Jun 7, 2023

Debian Bookworm Update

As the release of Debian Bookworm is very near and is going to happen on the next Saturday, I want to update my laptop just a little earlier.

Basically, everything went straight through after executing the following as root:

sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sed -i 's/bullseye/bookworm/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
apt update
apt full-upgrade
reboot

After this, my encrypted Debian desktop worked fine except for some Gnome customizations which changed and screensharing.

Some gnome extensions are not supported anymore:

  • Sound Input Output Chooser:

    • choosing and remembering outputs was not natively supported in Debian bullseye - which is where this extension helped a lot
    • the gnome quick menu nowadays has the same functionality integrated (only visible when input is actually in use)

  • Night Theme Switcher:

    • the manual night theme switcher was moved to the Gnome Quick menu, so the button is not visible anymore
    • everything else works as expected

  • Legacy theme switcher is needed to support switching the theme of old gtk3 apps

  • Extended Gestures are not needed anymore, the default gestures are good enough

Screensharing did not work, which was quite a fuzz to find the problem. I found the solution basically in this outdated thread: https://askubuntu.com/a/1398720, but do not install pipewire-media-session as this is deprecated in favor of wireplumber.

  • xdg-desktop-portal-gnome was not installed so screensharing did not work at all

Another pain point, unrelated to Debian but happened as I updated external debs too:

  • latest Ferdium did not work
    • downgrade to v6.2.3 helped
    • until this issue is fixed: https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-app/issues/1099
    • I still need to run ferdium with ferdium --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer e.g. edit the ferdium.desktop file to get the pipewire portal

Except for those small problems, everything worked very well.

I still use the following Gnome Extensions:

Debian Bookworm brings different power profiles with it, which is a very neat function based on underclocking the CPU in power-saver mode. This is very noticeable, for example, the time to open up a terminal or when using Overleaf in the browser. So I have it as “Balanced” most of the time and switch to “Performance” if needed.

Somehow one day my Debian switched to having a very high battery usage in idle. I looked into this issue when upgrading to bookworm and found help on AskUbuntu and Reddit:

sudo -i
echo 'deep' > /sys/power/mem_sleep

and edit /etc/default/grub and edit the default cmdline to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem_sleep_default=deep"

This did the change from the battery using 50% while idling a night to using ~2-7% per night of idling. As I do not have a dedicated swap partition and using hibernation would require one (a swapfile can not be used for hibernation), that is a very great way to get a very usable suspend experience.

update touchscreen

For touchscreen tablet devices running gnome you might want to checkout these extensions: