Dragging my Pi out of the walled garden
June 13, 2026
I moved my Raspberry Pi 4B from Ubuntu 24.04 to Debian Trixie, and I did it on purpose, with both hands.
Ubuntu is supposed to be open. For a long time it was the easy answer, the friendly Linux that just worked. But somewhere along the way Canonical started building walls inside the open field. The snap thing is what finally wore me down. Every time I reached for a package the normal way, the system kept steering me into the snap store instead, whether I had asked for it or not. That is a small thing on any given day. It is a large thing the moment you realize the machine has quietly stopped doing what you told it and started doing what the company preferred.
I do not rent my operating system. I own my machine, top to bottom, or it is not really mine.
So I dragged this Pi out of the walled garden and into Debian. Debian is open, and it is free in the way that actually matters: no company standing between me and my own computer, deciding which store I shop in. Debian Trixie arrived as a bare bones image, far more setup than Ubuntu ever hands you, and that turned out to be the whole point.
I have heard people complain for years, every single time they have to set up a fresh machine from scratch. I had the opposite reaction. I had a wonderful time. A bare image is not a burden, it is a blank bench. I brought the network up myself, grew the partition myself, set the users and the access myself, and stood the entire web stack up by hand. When I was finished, there was not one piece of that machine I did not understand, because I had put every piece there with my own hands.
That is the trade nobody tells you about. The walled garden hands you convenience and quietly keeps the keys. The bare image hands you work and gives you the keys back. I will take the work every time.
hybx-test runs Debian now, up on WiFi, serving every one of my sites, and answering only to me. It behaves exactly the way I built it, because I built all of it. That was not a chore I survived. That was a machine I took back.
My machine. My rules.
Want to do this one yourself? Every step, from finding the image to serving the sites, is written down in the build log: Migrating to Debian Trixie.