How I updated my Netrunner 20.01 with Debian 11

First to say: I’m not a Linux freak. No technical guru. I’m just an old man with too much (?) time.

I have MX Linux 21 KDE on one computer and Netrunner 21.01 on the other. I have waited for a new and updated Netrunner for a long time. In the final I played around and did one myself. Find solutions here and the there on the net. The result is very good for me. Perhaps someone else can have use of my experiments.

This is what I did if someone dare to try:

Be sure that your current installation, based on Debian 10, is up to date.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Then upgrade to Debian 11.

sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt --purge autoremove

Check your /etc/apt/sources.list file. It must look like this:

deb Index of /debian stable main contrib non-free
and / updates main contrib non-free
and / stable-updates main contrib non-free

If you, as I, will use Debians backports for newer packages, make a new line in the suorces.list file:

deb Index of /debian bullseye-backports main

and save the file. Make a new

sudo apt update

Now you can install the latest libreoffice for example. But first remove the old one:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

And get the newest possible from backports.

sudo apt-get -t buster-backports install libreoffice/or whatever you want.

I myself have not seen any issues in this upgraded Netrunner, except for one. And its the same problem that occurs in clean Debian 11 KDE and in MX Linux 21 KDE - my Nextcloud desktop client don’t syncronise correct. I used this command (as root) in a terminal, restarted the computer and the problems was gone. Don’t ask me why, I just followed a tip I found after a looooong search.

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Good luck!

Thanks for your report. That is a great guide and accomplishment.
The sysctl tweak is something we will keep an eye on to see if we can ship that without limits by default.