Setup my Debian

I have a laptop - Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th generation - with Intel Core i7-8550U, 16GiB RAM and 2K resolution display. It has the performance hardware and a incapable cooling system with only single one fans. After 6 years, the Microsoft Windows bring it terrible experience, the heavy heating make me feel so bad when I use it in the room without air-conditioning. To save this device, I choose to install a Linux on it.

Why Debian?

There has so many out-of-box Linux distributions with very good Desktop experience like Ubuntu, Fedora. But I finally chose Debian with the following reasons:

1. Ubuntu is "Microsoft Windows (Linux Edition)", Canonical feeds user some features that a few user with non-good experiences.
2. Fedora is good, easy to install and easy to use. But
3. the servers I own are running on Debian. And there does not have a good enough rpm-based Linux distro, so I pass the Fedora.
4. For decreasing the cost of learning, I chose Debian as my daily Linux distro.

Fighting against the inconvenient network

I spent too many time on the installing Debian into the disk. The most problem is accessing the Debian security repository is bloody slow in China, the average download speed is 2-3KiB per sec and full installing will spend more than 24 hours. So the net-install with the small image is impossible choice.

I use the "complete installation image" to install the necessary desktop environment without online package repository. Then I finally finish the installation after spending 4 hours.

The problem of 2K resolution

Before I chose Debian, I tried Fedora on my laptop. The default DE of Fedora workstation is GNOME, it does not have fractional scaling as default, everything is too big in the 200% scale on the 14-inch 2K screen. Then I enable the fractional scaling through the complicated configuring, but the fractional scaling on GNOME is not good, web browser and some applications are blurry.

After the bad experience with 2K resolution, I installed the KDE spin of Fedora. Everything is better, include the web browser. I don't know why the both of GNOME and KDE are drived by Wayland, but the GNOME is so terrible on 2K resolution.

Even the KDE design system is not unified, I still chose it as my desktop environment.

Change the mirror

Most users in China will change the repository mirror of Linux distro package manager after installation. I chose tuna the largest open source mirror site in China (maybe) as my apt repository mirror.

Install necessary packages

sudo apt install fcitx5 fcitx5-pinyin flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak tmux git curl

Setup flatpak

# add the flathub
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

# change mirror to sjtu
flatpak remote-modify flathub --url=https://mirror.sjtu.edu.cn/flathub

Setup Environment

I have written a post about how to set development environment.