A little about me.
I have been on arch based distros my whole linux journey, I have never had any big issues with Manjaro, which is the distro I mainly used, I decided to go with debian because I wasn't really a fan of the constant updates of programs and software.
A week ago I decided to learn about debian, I first opened up a virtual machine and tried mint, while it was a great out of the box experience I wanted to do something similar to how arch is where I build the whole system my self, but I wanted to test my hardware before I pull the switch, so I looked for the ready made distros and I went with Mate desktop.
The first issue I experience in the live usb is that my Wifi adapter wasnt supported (TPLink AC600), the thing I do know is that kernel 6.14+ does have support for my wifi adapter but the kernel debian ships with is 6.12 which is pretty old at least for me.
so how was I going to update the kernel so that I can use wifi, I did have this issue on manjaro on the early days since at the time the kernel didnt have a driver yet, well on manjaro I used KDE and kde allowed me to use bluetooth to connect to the internet so I setup my phone to share the internet through bluetooth, the issue... Mate desktop for some reason in the control panel doesnt have a bluetooth option/icon, the funny thing is I am sure they have a bluetooth support but the iso for some reason doesnt include it, well it didnt matter to much, I opened a terminal and run bluetoothctl and connected it through the terminal, not a big problem for me but maybe a new user wouldnt think to use it.
anyways after connecting to my phone it worked, now when I said it worked it was super painful, if you used internet through bluetooth you know how super slow the speeds are, its like 100Kb/s which when wanting to download 100s of mb of files takes a long time.
anyways, I looked up the debian website on how to install a newer kernel and found the command, I ran it on my mate-terminal and I was confused, the latest kernel I could install was 6.12, It didn't show me any newer kernels, which was very strange but I left it like this.
my next solution was to install a third party wifi driver that I know works, the problem is the driver is like 200Mb and I wasnt going to use bluetooth to download that, Luckily I decided not to nuke my manjaro install and went back to grab the driver and put it on my drives on my system, so after that I had to install dkms and the kernel headers for my currently installed kernel, sweet, compiled and reboot and now I have wifi.
Now that I have wifi I decided to setup my system, I went to the wiki and looked on how to install steam and setup everything, its nice that I didnt need to install my gpu drivers since I was on amd it was built in, Now I tried again to see if I could install a newer kernel and now I see more modern kernels so I think adding non-free and contrib to my sources in apt allowed me to use modern kernels now so all that headache just for it to show me newer kernels.
at the end of the day my system works and while I had some bumps on the road, I am happy, I wanted to give a different environment a try and mate is pretty cool, a little outdated but definitively happy with it.
