I have put a 240 GB SSD into the computer that I edit the map mosaics on (in Gimp) which gives me 200 GB of swap file space so that large projects can be handled more readily. I have no actual intention of going beyond 100 layers as in the present projects; it will be more of use when I have to open two of these large projects in Gimp at the same time to transfer layers between them.
The SSD came from one of the other computers that I have, which for now has a regular HDD in its place. Eventually this computer will get a new SSD, but at the moment it is not a high priority to spend money on. The old Intel 120 GB SSD from the graphics editing computer went into a laptop that will be specifically streamlined just for a limited subset of the maps, including aerial photos of Canterbury, that will come in handy going to PT advocacy meetings.
I went to the Debian site and downloaded the latest version of Buster and found that the Debian project have moved buster up from alpha5 to rc1, bringing the eventual production release of buster a step closer. In fact, buster's official release should be occurring almost any day, although there is no official announcement from the community as yet. Feature freeze occurred three months ago and probably they are working on getting the bugs down to a specified target level before they will announce the release.
Running the installer showed it is practically the same as previous versions of Debian. At the task selection stage you get a choice of DDE, Gnome, Xfce, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, LXQt as desktop environments along with the unrelated choices of web server, print server, SSH server and standard system utilities. I always untick DDE and only choose one environment to install but several can be chosen if wanted. As always, the netinst went smoothly, although it is not as streamlined as the Lubuntu installation which has only five configuration steps, principally because it installs LXQt by default and does not allow a root password to be specified, or mirror locations. This caused an issue for me on my last Lubuntu install when a default mirror timed out when attempting to install Qgis and I had to change to a local mirror. DDE (Debian Desktop Environment) is difficult to find out info about and I always untick it. I remember letting it install once and it just seems to be a strange lightweight throwback to something very old like Gnome 2.
After finishing the install, the new installation of Debian Buster / KDE booted smoothly and I then had just some straightforward post install tasks to finish setting up the system which went well also. There was a somewhat odd glitch when the Bios didn't know which disk to boot from the first time rebooting independently post install and I had to change the settings to ensure it would boot from the new SSD. I guess with the change in SSDs it didn't automatically default to the same SATA port, yet the first reboot was able to magically bypass this setting. Since then software reinstallation has proceeded as usual for the system and it will soon be fully functioning again.
