Libinput is sadly one of the new breed of code, from the wayland crew, that is supposed to make things simpler (for who though, i can't help they mean simpler for them rather than for users/admins).

It is part of the code/project churn that i so wish the Linux ecosystem could get over and accept that one gets better software in the long run by continual refinement of existing code (no matter how crufty it may look at first glance) than constantly churning out new code.

>Except for that libinput bug which crippled my mouse for a year or so.

Try to install hackintosh, your silly debian bugs would look like a joke to you after that. Srsly, you are comparing OS, preinstalled on certified hardware, with debian, which works on ppc, x86, raspberry pi and so on.

The mouse and basic mouse inputs are things which absolutely should not break. Let alone for a bloody year.

And yet it did.

Someone's failing to mind their knitting.

Mind: I've seen some far worse breakage of other elements, and all very frustrating. But this is ... just exceptionally hard to excuse.

After keyboard issues (I'm dealing with those on another system -- hardware, mobile, ergo, not just a "well, replace the keyboard then" matter), mouse is very nearly as annoying. Screen/display would be up there as well.

Get your basic input, output, and storage right at the very least.

As for installing Debian on various kit -- I'm more than slightly familiar with it. Including doing zmodem transfers of UUEncoded DEBs over serial port in order to get PLIP up so that I could get PCMCIA ethernet running. Bootstraping from the Potato root tarball split out over ramdisks having initially booted Tom's Root Boot. Partition the hard drive, then cat the tarball into one piece, and untar.

(PLIP is actually surprisingly useful, it turns out.)

> As for installing Debian on various kit -- I'm more than slightly familiar with it. Including doing zmodem transfers of UUEncoded DEBs over serial port in order to get PLIP up so that I could get PCMCIA ethernet running. Bootstraping from the Potato root tarball split out over ramdisks having initially booted Tom's Root Boot. Partition the hard drive, then cat the tarball into one piece, and untar.

As a 'young' linux sysadmin (approaching 10-ish years), I felt like I was sitting at granpappy's feet listening to a story just then :)

Get off my lawn!

The fun part is that there are tools to address virutally any situation you're likely (or unlikely) to run into. If you know how the pieces work, how they come apart, and how to put them back together, you can to a hell of a lot.