This feels like the reviewers expected Debian to create their own desktop environment between releases or something. The point of Debian has always been a stable experience, not to be flashy.

Did the reviewer try to install it on some laptop that came with Windows Vista originally? This review seems to try to be as negative as possible, which is weird. Leh gasp, the gnome desktop took up “a whole 1GB of ram”. Then install xfce or mate dude.

Those installer problems are mysterious. I just installed Debian 12 with no issues, so in my book, being able to use WiFi from the outset was enough of an improvement to earn a couple big ol’ thumbs up.

Seems to me an inability to read plain text during the install.

For instance when you are asked to set the root password, it says that if you leave it blank, the user you’ll create will have sudo.
That’s the behavior you expect if you come from ubuntu or mint.

Unfortunate experience, and something I’ve never had happen with Debian. I’ve been on 12 for awhile. Of course I didn’t clean install, just did a normal dist-upgrade and had no problems, as has been the case for the last decade or so on this machine.

I had problems with the installer a few months ago when I tried to do an install using Virt-Manager. I would have assumed it would be fixed before release, so that does sound like an issue. I upgraded my bare metal install from 11 so I don’t have any problems there.

Other than that, a lot of Debian reviewers don’t seem to “get” Debian. I tend to avoid a lot of Debian reviews because it seems like most complaints boil down to, “It doesn’t do this - thing - like Ubuntu (or some other distro) does.” Debian is a vanilla Linux distribution that allows you to do your own set up and customizing, hopefully avoiding the poor decisions and introduced bugs common in the more “coordinated” distros.

I know a new user probably wouldn’t know that but you can switch to the third and fourth virtual terminal for a shell and more detailed errors in the installer (or at least you always could do that in the past, haven’t gotten around to installing a bookworm system using the installer yet).

Sounds a bit like a faulty image. I had similar problems once with Ubuntu. Turned out the image was corrupted. Always check your md5sums, kids.

How is LXD included in the repo as a first-class citizen a “conservative evolutionary step”. I know this review is from a desktop perspective so it probably doesn’t matter that much to the reviewer. But having a stable LXD platform that does not require Snap to run is a big step forward.

The same installer fail happened to me on one computer out of four.

I suspected the ISO I used was corrupt, so I re-downloaded and it was exactly the same.

I used a different media disk; a USB 3.0 drive instead of the original media, and it installed fine.

Everything else, the “he pieces are all in the same room, but they don’t fit together, they aren’t following a shared vision” or whatever, seems arbitrary. The author cites openSUSE as a polished example of a distribution for Debian to emulate, as if we haven’t all struggled with Packman repos not being in sync with the rest of the system and having to wait a day without any multimedia apps working because we did a ‘zypper dup’ at the wrong time, or needing the root password for end-users to update their own Flatpaks or install a printer. openSUSE’s vision is one guy who thinks the word Aeon is cool and pronounceable, who sees Gnome as the future of the platform and just punted on KDE.

So I don’t know what the author wants when they discuss shared vision. The first thing you do when you install Ubuntu and Pop!_OS and Mint is change the layout and wallpaper. So what is a shared vision for Debian? The same color everywhere?