Although Debian 11 codenamed Bullseye was released almost 7 months back on 14th August, 2021, it was only in January, 2022 that I upgraded all my computers running Debian 10 to Debian 11. Admittedly a little late to the party, I like to take a cautious approach to upgrading my systems, which is not very difficult to predict given my Linux distribution of choice! In this post, I am going to share my experience and the steps I used while doing the actual upgrade.
After tinkering with it for a while now I finally have got a very much functional global menu working on my Xfce4 desktop running on Debian 10. I will list down the steps I followed to get the global menu configured on my Debian Xfce box in this post.
For those of you who might be wondering what a global menu is, it is a way of displaying the application menus on the top of the screen like the way MacOS does. By default the Xfce4 desktop displays the menus right below the Window title bar separately in each Window.
Connecting to an IRC room may not be a difficult task but if you communicate with a group of members connecting from different locations across the globe and are in different timezones and if you don’t want to miss out messages from them while you are offline, you may find yourself in a tricky situation. In this post I am going to share the easiest and the most cost-effective way to always stay connected on IRC using Matrix.
I like the fact that Debian does not do a lot of customizations over the upstream packages by default but this also means extra work for you for setting up things after installing Debian on the PC. The upside is that you get to customize things exactly the way you like it. It definitely helps to have a list to start with and this post lists down some of the customizations I make after installing a fresh copy of Debian.
After the release of Debian 10 Buster, I installed it on my Dell Inspiron 3558 laptop which comes with onboard Intel HD Graphics. I am using Xfce desktop environment instead of the default Gnome desktop. After the installation, I would intermittently face the problem where the whole desktop would suddenly just freeze and stop responding to the mouse and the keyboard. Even after hours of waiting the system would never come back to the normal state and the only solution was to hard reboot the whole system. It seemed really weird as prior to installing Debian 10, I had Debian 9 running on it for more than a year and I never had any such issues.