Debian 12 Bookworm Minimal Install w/BTRFS 

Your video are great; however how do I know what you are saying is correct, how long have you been using linux, what's your background?

A few observations/suggestions about the mount options for the btrfs partitions as Debian 12 ships with BTRFS version 6.2: - rw -> is really not needed. By default it will mount in rw mode. - space_cache=v2 has been a default option since btrfs version 4.5 - no need to specify it. - discard=async is the default as of version 6.2, but only as long as the SSD drive AND storage controller supports it, and this is important. You don't want to enable async otherwise as it can cause issues. It's better to be safe and let btrfs decide. - ssd = nowadays btrfs can autodetect SSDs and enable this options so no longer necessary to specify it. It was only needed on 1st generation SSDs due to how they reported to the Os.

This is one of those videos I'll always refer to over the years, super usful calling out the options as you were doing them allowed me to just follow along audibly

Thank you for the videos, I find them very easy, simple and straight forward to learn from. I have been using DietPi for a while now to setup small servers but have always wanted to learn to do it manually. I usually just need a minimal install with ssh, samba/NFS, some security, backup and maybe a minecraft server or two running on the machine. Thanks to videos like yours I am edging ever closer to being able to do it manually. Thank you again.

I love your videos Drew. I am such a Debian fanatic, and I am very open to learning. Your content assumes nothing and has great depth. Personally, I prefer you walking through things (like your manual partition setup with BTRFS), so if people are "bored", they can fast forward..... Thank you!

Another great video, Drew. It seems Bookworm is getting a really good reviews from the community, probably the best a Debian release has received in a long time, if not the best. I think Flatpak's acceptance has helped with the popularity. Thanks for showing us the BTRFS setup again.

This was one of the top things that I was hoping that Debian would fix or adopt to get working out of the box when btrfs was chosen at install. But now is the perfect time for me to learn this, so your timing is perfect. I know that drive compression on things like Steam games can increase drive space. Thanks so much for this video, I'm going to watch it now and finally learn this. Edit: Yeah.......I'm never going to remember that.

Thank you so much I've been using linux for a little bit now and your video has taught me a bit more of what btrfs is capable of! Im definitely adding this to my notes in the future.

Was literally looking a guide for this yesterday thanks for making this video

Fascinating details. Good to have some insight into how this is is all put together. As a busy dad I used Spiral Linux to install a beautifully configured Debian 12.5 including btrfs & snapper. Saved me *hours*

Nooice! Just installed Debian 12. Now I am going to go back and do a minimal install. Thanks for the great video.

Great video! I immediately subscribed :D Thanks for showing how to setup BTRFS. I was trying Bookworm in a VM, and was kind of lost when I had to set up subvolumes.

Well done! Best I've seen on this subject. Thank you.

Just found this channel today! Subscribed instantly! Thank you for your time and detail

I just installed a minimal install of debian12. I was about to go through this procedure, however i took a gamble. I found on a website that the key thing is that debian will install gnome by default even if you uncheck it. However, because i didn't uncheck the first box "debian graphical ...." i still got gnome. I tried again, and voila, with out the expert mode, i have created a minimal debian12. Thanks for the info though. Its very well presented and i like your very precise way of showing how to do something! Keep it up!

Hey Drew, good to see you posting videos again!

Thanks to your tutorial I am finally able to use Debian with BTRFS. I’ve done it before with other Debian based distros but never able to achieve it in Debian. So, thank you so much.

Sehr, sehr gut erklärt. Kann jeder komplett nachvollziehen. Uneingeschränkte Empfehlung! Super! Vielen Dank.

Love your videos, Drew! Keep going.

Thank you! Im running debian testing with snapshots in case something goes wrong now thanks to this guide.

Thank you so much! I've looking for this. So appreciated.

Waiting for the next part. And my kind recommendation to you, make tutorial about server installation of Debain (minimal) like web server, mail server and how to create user credentials to several employees. Hopefully waiting for it.

I'm struggling to unmelt my brain, but I will be using this guide with much appreciation.

Good video. It can make sense to create more subvolumes, perhaps /var/cache, /var/log/, /var/spool, /var/tmp. Doing so, you can exclude these directories from the snapshot.

Very nice and informative.

Well explained and simple to follow. Thanks! It would be nice to have an in-depth look into btrfs snapshots administration as a follow up to this video.

Just starting a bookworm journey myself. I have used different distros in the past, Fedora, CentOS, and Mint mostly. Time for a change and refresh. Looking to build a custom workstation setup that includes a DE and possibly sway. If you are going to make this into an ongoing series I am subbed to come along for the ride.

Great video, well informative message thanks

Just did this, great vid thanks a lot One tip to those who are installing this on vm's, don't forget to activate the EFI option on the machine settings so you get the EFI system option

Thank you for your efforts! Looks clear and very useful. By the way, ctrl+alt+F2 is not convinient, and ctrl+alt+F1 too. Use alt+→ and alt+← accordingly.

GREAT VIDEO-- I have this and LOVE IT-- I have added KDE to mine myself-- to build it the way I wanted. SUPER system-- rock solid- FASTER than the arch junk I was trying.. and just SUPER GOOD!!! I get RID of swap too... Today- I'm running SPARKY LINUX 7--- which is a GREAT distro - based on DEBIAN 12, and has good tool, is SIMPLE- light- VERY FAST- and GREAT-- with the stability of Debian 12.... LOVE IT-- Sparky has been my MAIN system for a LONg time-- and I ALWAYS go back to it when I hop-- ALWAYS-- it's just that GOOD... for beginners too!!!

I like this video I can't wait to see what have for us with hyperland on Debian that will be the best on how to configure it

Thanks to for this nice tutorial! 😀

As an Arch user, I approve this. Jokes aside, this is a bless. Recently I test lmde, and use command line to do the partition in conjunction with gui installer. I just grab arch-install-script to setup fstab fast.

Thank you for this guide

Hey, great video. If you have a separate /home partition, what would be the changes in setting up BTRFS? My SSD is tiny so I generally have /home on Hard Disk.

Legit content.

This is pretty much how I did my install a few days ago. I wish the Debian installer had more functionality for btrfs partitions, its annoying having to switch tty and do it all yourself. Especially when they let you configure pretty much everything else in the expert install.

Perfect, Thx Sir.

Hello Drew. I enjoyed this install. I have a question if you feel it's in the scope of your channel. When your setting the options on your subvolume mounts these two were changed from your previous install demonstrations. rw was added and space_cache was changed to space_cache=v2. I'm just curious why you made the change. I'm just another guy using linux.

I don't recall Debian 11 taking nearly as long to update as the regular Debian 12, so am hoping minimally-installed is a lot better. Sure wish antiX was easier to use, because I love how minimal it is.

Perhaps you could do a separate video where you configure this system with snapper to do snapshots. It's more complicated to setup but also more flexible than timeshift.

Thanks for the post. Apart from your UEFI/EFI changes, I am asking myself why you not use the default BTRFS settings to install the Debian base system out of the box using the installer? Did you do it just to assign your a home subvolume and add your specific BTRFS mount options to fstab? Do you have indications, that the default mount options would not do the job installing the base system? Just curious and to understand what's the downside of not doing it the standard way using the standard expert BTRFS install procedure.

Thanks for the video ! I tried timeshift istall on 3 different machines, on general install with KDE and could not get it to work, it would not even start, noticed there is a program called backup in the system. I need to get into more advanced installs with BTRFS and select my prefered software from the start !

I really would like to know which sources of reference we could use to understand what is being doing here. Too many concepts I don't know. There are things I never imagined we could do.

Hello! I'm new, and I think you're good. Why, at 18:16, did you not enable automatic updates?

Another person who prefers Micro. 😀

Could you explain what exacly you have done in the chang partition part and why you think that is the better setup?

I followed along and successfully completed the minimal install. Thanks for the info. Since completing the install I have added cups, vim and tmux. I am trying to stay away from a gui as long as I can. Could you do a follow up video showing how to expand the install without adding a gui? Or could you or any readers suggest useful text only tools?

I installed Debian 12 a few days ago from the minimal install CD but I did pick a desktop as I wanted to make sure I got all of the hardware and drivers. I started with Gnome Flashback as it is one of the most minimal ones and is easy to remove once you have installed another desktop. Then I installed the Cinnamon desktop then removed Gnome Flashback and I am now running Cinnamon. I installed Cinnamon Core which gives you the desktop but not all of the unwanted bloatware like LibreOffice and other's I don't want. I must say that I am finding the Debian Cinnamon lighter and better than Linux Mints LMDE as Debian's one does not come with so much heavy stuff. Where as Linux Mints Cinnamon for some reason comes with the Mate Panel half of the Mate Desktop which I don't like. Because if I wanted that I would just install Mate Desktop and I don't seen the point in having a Panel from another desktop which kind of looks out of place on Cinnamon. Also Debian Cinnamon is not using much disk space at all only where as Mints version was using much more. Probably because of all of the apps and packages that get installed when you first use it. All of my drivers work out of the box so I did not have to configure anything. So yes this version of Debian is worth trying and I think the desktops are lighter than the Ubuntu versions as they don't have any Snaps or Flatpaks. Unless you want to install then that is. When I used Debian 11 it was not so user friendly as the network and some of the other settings were turned off but in 12 they have added support for drivers for the first time. Which makes it easier for users like myself who are coming over from Windows. The only thing I don't like is the Firefox ESR which is an out of date version but that you can change that by adding the repositories of the updated Firefox. Which is something you would have to do on Ubuntu as they only have the Snap version. These things are easily fixed. I am quite liking Debian and I may try another desktop on my other laptop as it does seem to be a lot lighter than Ubuntu. Although I like Ubuntu and Linux Mint as well.

Can you made one fresh install video explaining the same but for a disk with partition root and partition home separated? Thanks.

Excellent thank you. If only you could enlarge text display in your terminal input . I'll be watching this video many times till I can wright out the instructions in a note book, I keep notes for different distros, apps & processes🤣 Will the printer work work, It does in POP_OS out of the box, configuring printers has always been a breaking point for me. I just skip it most times. The PC I'll be installing Debian on will have 2 SATAs for storage & 1 NVME ssd . Can't just throw away those old hdds How & where do you buy debian install media to support it? Are there printed official manual like slackware?

Do you achieve the same as a seperate home partition with the terminal stuff?

Hi there Drew, thank you for the nice video! I'm currently trying to follow, but my PC is not UEFI but BIOS. What would the differences be in my case? I'm struggling specially to establish the boot position, since an EFI partition doesn't apply for me. Thanks a lot!

@JustAGuyLinux Should the ssd option within the fstab be set to something else if it's a mechanical drive or just omitted completely?

Do you have a Timeshift setup video to follow on from this video?

Why BTRFS vs EXT4? Currently running WattOS R12 love its clean simplicity, Was thinking if I could use it for my base template . Just learning I'm installing on an older laptop sata so I'll add swap .

Drew, will this perticular partition setup mess up dual boot that is already setup? I have Fedora 38 and Windows 11 setup already on REfind boot manager.

wow, advance video, advance tutorial thanks

I wonder how you can install Debian with an encrypted device and set up all of the kde and gnome package software installers.

Put "nosgx" in to /etc/default/grub" kernel line :D P.S. Can you make video of adding minimal install of KDE/Gnome of top of this?

it's going to be wonderful if you can showcase a snapper rollback mechanism. With your current subvolume setup, it always fails for me

Too bad setting up subvolumes is still how I would do it on arch. Hopefully it would be made easier in the future

i have a bit of a general question about linux. i'm probably misunderstanding something, but if the instructions on how to mount the FS are stored on the FS itself in the fstab file, then how does the system read the fstab file without knowing how to access the FS in the first place?

Great video. I mounted the root partition with: mount -o rw,noatime,space_cache=v2,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,subvol=@ /dev/mmcblkop2 /target and the install isn't compressed. I den decided to change the compress option to: compress=ztsd:6 still nothing is compressed during install. So the question is. How can I have the installer compress while installing the system?

Wouldn't it be prudent to HAVE a swap partition available, and configure Zram to use it if you ever DO run out of memory by adding a backup swap partition or file?

Question: I wanna install Debian in the way you described (alongside the suggestions from @jhboricua) on my machine (ergo, on metal), but I do have a Windows partition on it as well that I REALLY don't wish to lose. What are some things I need to do differently here aside from the obvious like not formatting my entire drive? What do I do with the EFI partition that already exists on my machine (it allows me to boot into Windows)?

It's nice video . But i have a question . Can i dual boot with your way ? I am just a new with debian.

Hi. Getting trouble with snapper, could you help me? When I make a snapshot as default, then reboot, does not boot with the snapshot mark as default. How I can resolve this? Thanks.

Great video! But what if i windows partitions and stuff?

don’t want mess up the @rootfs, can we just skip those commands and install? does that make any difference? does Nvme differ from sata ssd?

What was the point in renaming the @rootfs subvolume to @ ? Could @ not coexist with @home? Or does @rootfs somehow imply that there are no additional subvolumes? I tend to not use btrfs because of its complexity, and subvolumes are one of the reasons for that. Yet, they are actually one of its most interesting features.

nice vid very informative.. but why not to set up swap on ssd?

Hello, i'm new on linux so this could be an stupid question. i used opensuse for a while and iirc it creates 9 subvolumes by default like @, @tmp, @var, @home etc. but you created only @ and @home. what are differences between what you did and opensuse's default subvolumes?

How would you do this on arm64 pi 4?

Is there any security risk by using EFI instead of BIOS stemming from the fact that an extra ESP partition is required that cannot be encrypted via LUKS, etc? If I'm not mistaken, with BIOS boot you can use a single partition for everything and that is encryptable via LUKS. In EFI boot you have the bootloader and kernel on an unencrypted (as in: does not work with encryption) partition, right? Would that enable an adversary (i.e. thief of a laptop) to "simply" put a modified boot loader and/or kernel on the unencrypted /boot partition? I was always curious about this since EFI is supposed to be more secure than BIOS but the requirement of having a part of your system unencrypted sounds more like a security risk. Or did I understand something wrong?

How did you manage to record a bare metal installation?!

Needing a network connection for netinstall is the major downside. I heard or read the other day that there is a version between regular Debian and the netinstall that already has the network files on it and I think it is contrib and non-free, but those can be commented out after install. Gawd, I hope I made a good note of where to find that .iso

So I inferred that the Debian installer automatically created a BTRFS sub volume called @rootfs, but how did YOU figure that out?

5:26 for some reason the menu shows everything except efi partitioning. does anyone have an idea why?

is the install the same for NVME drives?

I ❤ your vids. Watch the all. However, today I wanted to make a request if you allow. Can you please mske a vid/tutorial for lmde6 btrfs install, preferably in expert install (for the mount options of the subvols). Thanks in advance in anticipation of a positive response.

Maybe you should experiment with Linux LVM?

As an aside at 16:41, I’ve always wondered what the proportion of people who refuse the non-free firmware and how does that ultimately work out for them? In practice, you and other RU-vidrs say to just go ahead and accept the non-free. When it gets down to it, who really SHOULD refuse the nonfree?

I try to install it and Debian did not Recognize me ?

To my understanding btrfs is nothing but trouble. I'll stick with LVM

you have to use nano... close video :P

I don't know why I'm watching this video and why youtube recommended to me but thanks.

Did everything until unable to install grub in dummy😮 wasted my time 30 minutes

Debian 12 might have been okay (with me) had it not abandoned python2. Although there are ways around to have python2 back, Debian *officially* abandoning python2 is a total disaster for a 70-some old computer nut. I hope there would be a Debian derivative still keeping python2 alive. Otherwise, I might abandon Debian, et. al. altogether and go back to Slackware.

PLEASE CAN YOU HELP? 😢 I got to mount dev sda1 at 11:27 on your video but I got an error saying “failed: no such file or directory” I am using an SSD on my laptop so I changed your sda1 command for nvme0n1p1 (and nvme0n1p2 for sda2) so I don’t know if that makes any difference? Any idea what’s gone wrong for me?

what is all this USB drives and burning? wtf is that?? someone said it was "image"? are you kidding me??? Debian hasnt gone past that yet? seriously, like on usb drives or cd? like in the 1990's? it doesnt have digital self-storage or can install itself from the cloud?? seriously thats so old. in the digital cloud storage world, who the hell uses USB drives or Cd's. New computers do not even have cd drives anymore. now yes computers do have USB slots for a mouse, but USB drives???? I mean how mny hundreds of USB drives whould you have putting everything on USB drives like a freaking 80s floppy disc????? seriously booting from usb drive or cd, well thats like saying you want to watch a hd movie: like, avatar 2 on your vhs vrc?? i mean cant we get away from the way microsoft makes us do things??? is it no so: most people want to use linux software like redhat or Debian to get away from that????? and the first thing you do to get linux is to take a page of downloading and installing is right out of the microsoft playbook??? isnt that what you do when you haveone windows and want to get the new windows, because MICROSOFT MAKES YOU DO IT?? LINUX CANT DO A DIGITAL INSTALL?? So lets copy the way we install windows to install Linux? can we get past that? am i wrong here? is there something im missing??