Well as usual I have decided to rush in boots and all and get Debian on this computer. Creating the pen drive for the netinstall image that I used previously to create VMs was a little tricky until I realised it had to be in FAT32 format rather than ext4. The Debian installer threw up a warning about using the Unetbootin tool to create the pen drive, but it worked flawlessly. The installation is practically the same as Xubuntu except you get a choice of desktop environments, from which you can choose, in this case, Xfce. It being old hat I soon had the partititions set up on the SSD (2x 60 GB, one the boot partition and the other swap) and the installer flew along as expected. One of the reasons for wanting to change the installed OS is some issues that have come up with Xubuntu 17.10 which naturally proves one has to be careful about installing the latest bleeding edge in a production environment. For this reason I decided not to install the testing repository and will find some other way to update Xfce if it is an old version.
Once having completed the base install the next step is, as usual, to set up the RAID array, which we do by logging in as root and then installing the RAID software and configuring it, just as I have numerous previous times. I’m being incautious by not having made a backup before starting the install, but I did have a backup done a couple of weeks ago, and there are two disks in the array that are exact copies of each other, and it’s unlikely to be an issue to get the array working again. So actually it was very straightforward. So now for the rest of the day I will just be tweaking the installation and re-installing bits of software on the computer. As usual as soon as I pointed /home at the RAID array and then logged on as myself everything came back especially the XFCE panel and menus and it is hard to see any difference from Xubuntu. One of the key things I can do with this version of Debian is natively install a stable version of Qgis master alongside the most up to date version and at the moment it is building an installation from source that should work OK as it has on all the VMs I have put together up until now with Debian on them.
[UPDATE] So MainPC has been OK. The PC in the bedroom crashed a couple of days ago so I just jumped in and installed Debian on it as well. This is a bit tricky to do in general because of the differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and it took a bit more work to get it up and running. I still have to install a bit more software on it to finish it off, but it is going fairly well. I don’t have a plan to migrate all the computers, and will only address it whenever it is necessary. So I still have one PC running Xubuntu and have no plans to change that.