back to article Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

There are legions of Ubuntu and Debian remixes out there, but most try to add stuff to the basic distro. Xebian is a refreshing change because it's simpler than its progenitor. Xebian is a simple Debian-based distro with the Xfce desktop. It's easy to install, and has a pleasing, fairly minimal desktop layout, very much like …

  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "It defaults to a very simple disk layout with a root partition and a swap partition and nothing else."

    Why do they all do this? A separate Home partition should really be included as a default. With that you can wipe the rest,install something else and not lose your data. OK, you could backup home before wiping and restore afterwards - right up until that bowel loosening moment when you realise you've been a tad over-anxious to get on with the install.

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      minimal partitioning

      If for some reason I could only have two partitions I would drop swap (use a swap file instead) and keep home separate.

      Mind you, where possible I prefer to have home on an entirely separate drive.

      -A.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: minimal partitioning

        There's no reason to only have two partitions nor to have a home partition as an alternative to swap. I would use considerably more but /home in addition to root and swap would be a better default. Personally I'd add partitions for /opt and /usr/local. Depending on what it was to be used for I might also add one for /srv.

    2. ChoHag Silver badge

      > right up until that bowel loosening moment when you realise you've been a tad over-anxious to get on with the install.

      You only need to do that once.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Once is enough. In fact there's a good argument that once is more than enough.

    3. Spoobistle

      defaults to a very simple disk layout

      I guess for "default" read "lowest common denominator". If the Calamares installer is the same as Debian uses, then the Manual Partitioning option in the install will allow for separate /home, on a separate drive etc.

      Not sure how much swap partitions are used these days.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: defaults to a very simple disk layout

        A manual option, yes. But if we assume the uninformed first time user then it would be better to make it the default. This isn't a Windows install - Linux can and should do better.

      3. Norman Nescio

        Re: defaults to a very simple disk layout

        Not sure how much swap partitions are used these days.

        I use a swap LVM volume on a LUKS-encrypted disk because it allows me to hibernate securely without fiddling around with resume_offset* in kernel parameters. Ensuring a hibernated system is secure is a bit niche, I admit, but really shouldn't be.

        There are probably better ways, but it's what I am used to.

        NN

        *Linux kernel: Swap Suspend and Linux kernel: Using swap files with software suspend (swsusp)¶

      4. LionelB Silver badge

        Re: defaults to a very simple disk layout

        > Not sure how much swap partitions are used these days.

        Ha. I find myself generally turning off swap - because a certain well-known computational suite (*cough* Matlab *cough*) has the annoying habit of hitting the swap when you accidentally request more RAM than is available, and bringing the system to its knees. This is almost certainly not what you want -- ever -- and is especially egregious when running in batch mode, possibly on someone else's machine. With swap turned off, it gracefully errors with an "Out of memory". In fact I cannot think of any scenario where I'd actually want my system to grind to an almost-freeze, as opposed to just erroring out.

    4. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      "and not lose your data"

      Surely that's what backups are for? (At least for the parts of your data that aren't linked to a git repository somewhere, or stored elsewhere on your LAN.)

      A single partition means you don't guess wrongly how much you need on each volume. For a novice, that seems to me like a big advantage.

      1. Norman Nescio

        Yes, I have had /boot and /var that were on separate LVM volumes fill up due to unexpected behaviour before now, and it's irritating when that happens.

        However, in neither case did I lose personal data, In the worst case, I could have re-installed the operating system and carry on with the existing /home (on its own volume). Having a single partition or volume for everything is simple and convenient, but the aberrant log-file that filled up my /var would have filled up an entire disk quite happily.

        Some people advocate using LVM and not allocating all the space on the disk initially, leaving a buffer than can be used to extend any LVM volumes that fill up.

        As ever with Linux, your use-case and level of experience/competence determine the optimal solution for you, and the great thing is that you can usually find a configuration that works for you. Currently my daily driver laptop has (from bottom up) a LUKS encrypted disk with only the ESP in plain-text, LVM, a swap volume, and a BTRFS volume with a subvolume for /home, and some unallocated LVM space. I will not argue that it is the best layout for anyone (including myself) as I'm experimenting with BTRFS at the moment. It hasn't cause me any immediate pain points.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Linux

      Xebian defaults to a very simple disk layout

      Use GParted to partition the disk and then edit fstab post boot.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Xebian defaults to a very simple disk layout

        [Author here]

        > Use GParted to partition the disk and then edit fstab post boot.

        You can but you don't need to. This is the default layout, but you can create `/`, `/home` and swap by hand during installation if you want, no problem.

    6. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > A separate Home partition should really be included as a default.

      You know what, I entirely agree, and I always use that setup myself (on bare metal, anyway). But it's the modern trend of simplification.

      When I routinely ran openSUSE, my root filesystem (Btrfs by default) often got corrupted because it filled up. Official advice: don't use root and home partitions, use one big one. It filled up because it was too small! Use the whole disk!

      My data was safe _because_ it was in a separate filesystem, _not_ on Btrfs. That meant I could reboot into a 2nd copy of the distro and fix stuff. But to the SUSE True Believers in Btrfs, the answer was to eliminate the config which had kept my data safe and sound.

      1. YetAnotherXyzzy

        Ah, someone else ran into that too. OpenSUSE has always struck me as a sound, safe distro that doesn't put the user at risk by jumping onto bandwagons, so their IMO too-quick leap to Btrfs by default seemed iffy to me. Then the system lockups because thanks, Btrfs. Oh well, there's no place like /home when root goes bad.

    7. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Goes back to MS-DOS partitions and old versions of Linux that only allowed 4 primary partitions, and did not like certain filesystems being in extended partitions. All things no longer an issue, but they defined the way that Linux installs work.

  2. Kev99 Silver badge

    But how fat is it?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. gosand

    Can you install another init like in Debian?

    You can install Debian without systemd, as noted in their wiki : https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_installation_time

    I could only figure out how to do it from the old red-and-blue installer although it doesn't specify that on the wiki. I couldn't seem to get to a terminal from the calamares installer.

    So I have Debian 12 running in a kvm with sysvinit.

    If Xebian only supports calamares, I am not sure if you can do it. I'm running Devuan, and its updated version based on Deb12 is available. So if my dist-upgrade goes sideways and I have to reinstall, then maybe I'll try out Xebian. Not likely since the last few dist-upgrades have been quite boring and successful.

    Good to have options.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. CAPS LOCK

    Yes, well this is all very nice and so on, BUT...

    ...in my humble and possibly not very well informed opinion, distro reviews should include some perusal of the community. Forum? 'Yes' or 'No' but also 'Questions actually being answered? Friendly community or 'RTFM' community (for examples of each see forums.linuxmint.com and forums.freebsd.org ). One of the key strengths of FOSS is community support.

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