Butterbian questions

Butterbian
1

Hi, eager to try butterbian, coming from Spiral Linux (which is dormant/abandoned) and openSuse experience. I have a few questions before I try:

  1. In case you cease to maintain it, is there anything that needs to be done in order to fall back to an ordinary debian?
  2. I’d like to follow the testing branch instea of stable branch, post install. I can do it myself but is there anything I should look out for in your experience?
  3. I’d like to use KDE. Can you refer to instructions on how to do it when starting from butterknife?

Thanks

2

Hey, good questions. I am writing this one as a reference thread since questions like this could come up a lot. Sorry about the time investment in reading this drivel.

NOTE: why butterknife at all? The reason to pick butterknife over a vanilla Debian forky live ISO is the btrfs + timeshift + grub-btrfs stack, configured out of the box. Coming from Spiral you’ll recognize the idea: snapshot-aware Debian, just with timeshift instead of snapper. If you don’t want that stack, a Debian forky netinst gets you to KDE in fewer steps and questions 1 and 2 below mostly evaporate.

1. Falling back to plain Debian

Nothing to do. butterknife is just upstream Debian Trixie from deb.debian.org. No Butterbian repos, no pinning, no patched packages. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, your box keeps pulling Debian security updates like any other Debian box.

The Butterbian-flavored bits are tiny and optional: a first-login WM picker that disables itself after one run, a lightdm theme, and (if you went btrfs) a timeshift + grub-btrfs apt hook you’d probably want to keep anyway.

2.Switching to forky (testing)

Standard Debian move. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list, swap trixie for forky, then apt update && apt full-upgrade. Few things to watch:

  • Drop the trixie-backports line. Backports doesn’t exist for testing.
  • trixie-security becomes forky-security.
  • Keep non-free-firmware if you needed firmware to boot.

If you went btrfs at install, the apt pre-invoke snapshot hook is your best friend on testing. When something breaks (and on testing it will, occasionally), roll back from the GRUB snapshot menu and get on with your day.

3. KDE

KDE is a big package set, so every apt run is going to make timeshift snapshot a lot of bytes. Not broken, just be aware.

If you want a pre-themed DE with the snapshot stack already wired up, Butterbian-XFCE might be the closer fit: install XFCE, then apt install kde-plasma-desktop on top and pick Plasma at the lightdm session menu. You get both DEs side by side and only paid for the snapshot setup once.

Going the butterknife route anyway: hit 0 at the WM picker to skip, then from the console pick a rung:

sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop   # minimal plasma
sudo apt install kde-standard         # plasma + the usual KDE apps
sudo apt install kde-full             # the kitchen sink (gimp, firefox, etc.)
sudo apt install task-kde-desktop     # Debian's curated task package

Reboot, log in via lightdm. Want sddm instead? apt install sddm and dpkg will offer to switch.

Just my random thoughts. None of this is a wrong answer, depends what you’re after.

3

Yes. I like the possibility to rollback the system. Why did you prefer timeshift and not snapper (in the Spiral Linux way)?

4

No technical reason. It is what I am used to.

If you specifically want the Spiral experience, nothing in the install is locked to timeshift. You can install snapper on top of the btrfs layout butterknife creates and switch over later.

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5

Why is Butterbian so stankin good?

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6

Because I refuse to ship a distro that ain’t slicker than a greased hog at a county fair.

Plus, name one thing with butter that ain’t stankin good. I’ll wait…

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8

Yikes. So much of that is wrong. The installer for butterbian-xfce is NOT new at all. The ONLY goal is to get BTRFS/Timeshift to work out of the box. The only custom installer is butterknife. Geez. If you’re going to say anything, at least educate yourself.

9

I just saw your question about KDE Plasma using butterknife. I tried that before Drew added the new option 9 in the latest ButterKnife. There were some missing firmware and drivers. I posted some issues and Drew fixed all that, so I’ve been testing and using a daily driver Intel NUC with Debian 13 Plasma all installed with butterknife 2.10. It’s basically task-KDE-desktop packages on top of a proper BTRFS system with timeshift and grub-btrfs.

An added plus is while you can boot into an old snapshot to test and restore to an older point in time, you can also fix it easily if grub is unbootable. Just keep a copy of Butterbian-XFCE4 ISO around. You can boot that ISO and the timeshift on that image can easily find your hardrive snapshots and allow you to restore them.

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