Hi,
I want to switch from Windows to Debian 11 using Hyper-v. The final aim is using Darktable. Is there any recommendation for a good starting installation? I. e. installing Gnome or avoiding such graphical environment?
It’s my first Debian (Linux) experience but I used Unix in professional environment. I guess I’ll be able of remembering old Unix command.
Regards.
Pascal
Hi @Pascal, and welcome!
I have never ever used Hyper-V, so please
do not expect any brilliant ideas from me
in that context:-(
However: two things come to mind:
-
What graphics card are you using?
Are you a fanatic regarding free–world drivers,
or would you accept proprietary drivers? -
A desktop environment presumably will make life
a bit easier for you – but why not start with one that
is a bit slimmer, like xfce, for instance?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Just to mention it if you are an old *nix hand: There is also Devuan, the distribution that closely tracks Debian except for systemd. Personally I use sysv init, but there are other non-systemd options as well.
It seems that Hyper-V is no longer able to virtualize gpu’s. (Read the final section)
So, I agree with @Claes that you’ll get a much better experience on a bare metal machine.
Why don’t you install Debian side-by-side with Windows (dual-boot setup)?
Hyper V will likely not have a properly color managed workflow either.
Soooo: if Hyper V will not offer wnat you need/want – why not
get a small-ish SSD (an old 120 gig one will be quite sufficient),
and then dual-boot à la @gadolf? In this way, your Win install
will still be (relatively) untouched.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Thank you all for your answers and advices. I was almost ready of uninstalling Debian using Hyper-v. I’ll switch to dual-boot setting.
Regarding the graphic card I’m using the one embedded on the mother card. I’m planning of upgrading my system which is almost outdated (Asus card with Intel I7 acquired in 2013). In the mean time I thought it was good time for diving in Debian.
Again thank you.
@Pascal To get the most out of darktable you ought to have
openCL working. And I do not think that that is possible
using 2013 onboard graphics.
Apart from that, I believe that everything will work just fine 
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Hi. Veteran Debian user here.
Debian might not be the best distro for someone starting with Linux, but if you’ve used Unix in a work situation then you should be fine.
Just note that if you run the current “stable” version of Debian, you are going to get Darktable 3.6.x - not 3.8.x. There are ways to get 3.8 on Debian that involve installing packages from outside the distro or upgrading to the Debian “testing” release.
A default GUI installation will give you a super stable GNOME desktop and all you have to do is to install the “darktable” package on top of that. I would not change the default GUI, but you can experiment with others in a different hyper-v VM.
I’m confident Debian will run fine under Hyper-V, but you won’t get hardware graphics acceleration. Getting this to work is advanced stuff that involves PCI/hardware “passthrough” - not sure if Hyper-V supports flavour of it that will work out of the box with Debian.
My own setup is Debian “sid” (testing) running DT 3.8 on a fast AMD laptop and using OpenCL acceleration provided by the in-processor AMD graphics support. I’m very happy with it.
All the best with Debian. Let us know how it works out.
Regards,
Koos
I’d like to make a correction.
On Debian “current” 11 Bullseye, DT 3.8.0 is available through the bullseye-backports repository.
The downside of it is that Lua is disabled and the plugins will not be available.
But DT 3.8 for debian 11 is available through the opensuse build service.