Well it seems my days of using Debian are numbered, I have used it for a number of years to rehabilitate old hardware for use on artworks and in the past as my day to day systems. Since I got my laptop I started using Ubuntu because it worked well with the newer unsupported hardware. Also I started shifting my work to headless Raspberry Pi’s for sound based work and feel confident with visual projects though I haven’t shown any yet. Every new release of Debian I would set up a system on a USB disk and with my current available hardware Wheezy isn’t performing well. The new Gnome 3 which needs good video support doesn’t help considering my old nvidia video card is unsupported by current drivers. I tried to downgrade video drivers using testing repository and the system broke twice so unless I find different hardware that is supported I am giving up.
I will try Lubuntu I don’t know if this will help but lets see. I love Debian and used it for around seven years, it is very stable but they have made a mistake with Gnome 3 and newer video drivers. Gnome classic is good but the video issues are still apparent even in classic the other issue was wifi it keeps dropping out, I had the same issue on Squeeze but it wasn’t as bad. My Squeeze set up is still great it is beautiful to use, I tried lxde which is good but I really love Gnome 2, most people are going to Mint which I may try if Lubuntu has issues. I like lxde too but due to the video issues it wasn’t as usable as Gnome classic for some reason. Since Lenny which to me was very user friendly it has been a cleaner Debian with less bloat but it seems more focused on its strengths and I appreciated Squeeze though it seemed a world away from Lenny so for me so it is adios. Raspbian uses Wheezy but with a new kernel and a slightly more user friendly set up, so I was looking forward to using it with my other hardware. I think the Raspberry Pi has probably made me a bit lazy but I like using it.
There is a lot of choice out there and I give Debian a big thumbs up, I still have a Lenny system and Squeeze. Really though for art pieces I don’t need new systems anyway and could just as well set up old versions of Debian but I will trek into some different territory and see what all the fuss is about with new distros etc.