Not a happy review from Distrowatch...

This feels like the reviewers expected Debian to create their own desktop environment between releases or something. The point of Debian has always been a stable experience, not to be flashy.

As a Debian (sid/ unstable) user myself, I am simply saddened that the reviewer had so many issues related to the install process, etc.
Yeah but you need to be able to install it in the first place

Seems to me an inability to read plain text during the install.

For instance when you are asked to set the root password, it says that if you leave it blank, the user you'll create will have sudo.
That's the behavior you expect if you come from ubuntu or mint.

Did the reviewer try to install it on some laptop that came with Windows Vista originally? This review seems to try to be as negative as possible, which is weird. Leh gasp, the gnome desktop took up "a whole 1GB of ram". Then install xfce or mate dude.

It's rarely the frontend chugging the ram. My minimal (full amd) Alpine Linux with Sway takes 430 mb on idle and with 2 tabs Firefox 1200 mb of ram.

Those installer problems are mysterious. I just installed Debian 12 with no issues, so in my book, being able to use WiFi from the outset was enough of an improvement to earn a couple big ol' thumbs up.

I had problems with the installer a few months ago when I tried to do an install using Virt-Manager. I would have assumed it would be fixed before release, so that does sound like an issue. I upgraded my bare metal install from 11 so I don't have any problems there.

Other than that, a lot of Debian reviewers don't seem to "get" Debian. I tend to avoid a lot of Debian reviews because it seems like most complaints boil down to, "It doesn't do this - thing - like Ubuntu (or some other distro) does." Debian is a vanilla Linux distribution that allows you to do your own set up and customizing, hopefully avoiding the poor decisions and introduced bugs common in the more "coordinated" distros.

Unfortunate experience, and something I've never had happen with Debian. I've been on 12 for awhile. Of course I didn't clean install, just did a normal dist-upgrade and had no problems, as has been the case for the last decade or so on this machine.

It seems like Distrowatch runs into install problems way more often than normal, to the point that I wonder if there's something wrong on their end.

The Linux Distro version of Artem’s Luck

Sounds a bit like a faulty image. I had similar problems once with Ubuntu. Turned out the image was corrupted. Always check your md5sums, kids.

Apparently, they did.

The media checksums passed, the hard drive had plenty of room on it (less than a quarter of the available space was used when the installer failed), and the installer requires very little RAM (less than 1GB).
- Huh, didn't see that, my bad.

I can concur about the installer. I tried to install Debian 12 something like 7 times on a laptop and it would always fail installing grub. The error message was quite generic and it took a whole lot of googling and finding how to get a proper error message that I was able to find out the following:

When setting up an encrypted LVM, you must also dedicate an unencrypted /boot partition for it to work. The installer never warned me I was partitioning wrong. I thought only an EFI partition was needed.

I think the solution for the Debian installer would be to give actual errors instead of "error!". Switching ttys reveal the actual error, but it's not intuitive at all.

How is LXD included in the repo as a first-class citizen a "conservative evolutionary step". I know this review is from a desktop perspective so it probably doesn't matter that much to the reviewer. But having a stable LXD platform that does not require Snap to run is a big step forward.

I know a new user probably wouldn't know that but you can switch to the third and fourth virtual terminal for a shell and more detailed errors in the installer (or at least you always could do that in the past, haven't gotten around to installing a bookworm system using the installer yet).