Till now I had been using Windows and WSL for all my development tasks. Things would get a bit tricky with WSL so I decided to go for a bare metal Linux on my PC.
I decided to choose Debian for the following reasons:
- The most popular desktop Linux distribution Ubuntu is derived from Debian
- Debian seemed more open source as Ubuntu is supported by a commercial company
- Debian seemed more stable as they have outlined that each stable update is Long term supported and packages are not always updated to reflect the newest features (with updates could come new security vulnerabilities) but get security updates
I used Rufus to create a Bootable USB drive with the Live Debian ISO. During the installation, I was only faced with one issue that was my hard drives were not detected for which I had to change the SATA mode in Bios to AHCI. This was a bit risky and had to be done with care. I did some research and followed a tutorial online which made it work successfully.
After installation, I am happy with the look and feel of Debian. All my development tools run perfectly fine. My local development environment cannot be better than this. Furthermore, I was already using all open source programs on my PC such as LibreOffice and Thunderbird so the switch was seamless. Let me not forget that everything is much faster on Debian as compared to Windows 11.