For the GRUB delay…hmm. GRUB’s pretty early in the boot process. I’m not totally sure what would add delay in Debian. Not a lot of per-distro difference there.

GRUB itself has a delay of a few seconds until it starts automatically booting Linux, time to give someone the option to choose something else. That delay is configurable and might vary on a per-distro basis, but that delay has the GRUB screen visible already. So I don’t think it’d give the symptoms you describe.

I’d think that you’d have to be either doing BIOS stuff or something very early in the GRUB startup to be getting a delay before the GRUB screen is visible.

considers

Maybe your BIOS is waiting for the old boot drive to come up – you said something about an external drive dying – then timing out and looking through the list of remaining bootable drives and finding GRUB installed there? Maybe try going into BIOS and explicitly selecting the Debian boot drive as being the drive that you want to boot from?

When installing Debian, if you choose to enable a root account then sudo is not installed by default and your user isn’t added to the sudo group. Next time try to opt for not enabling the root account to have a similar experience to other distros. Debian does this doe security reasons but it’s annoying for users used to a certain way of doing things. Many distros just disable root account by default so you don’t see that issue.

Just asking: how long have you been using Arch and why? What qualities did you like in it?

Going from Arch to Debian is a huge leap. In my personal opinion, Debian is a great distro for servers or really really conservative desktop users, but it gets stale really fast.

Something in between both is ideal for deskop use, like Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, etc… The half year release schedule keeps everything modern, but stable enough.

You said in another comment, that stability is the most important aspect for you. I recommend you…

Fedora Silverblue

Why?

• Great update schedule (see above)
• Extremely stable. Fedora at it’s base (already pretty reliable), immutable base (less bugs, since that’s more reproducible and therefore easier to fix), also
• Atomic updates. You either apply a functioning update, or no update at all. If you update on a traditional distro and loose power, it is only applied partially and your system is borked
• You can always rollback with one click if an update isn’t working as it should (e.g. screen flickering)
• Seamless updates. They just get installed in the background and when you reboot, the next image is already selected for you. I don’t even notice an update and never get annoyed. I shut my PC off anyhow every few days, since booting takes just a few seconds on an NVME.
• Base can be exchanged with one command. If you run Gnome and want to switch to KDE, you rebase with one command, reboot, and everything Gnome related is gone and KDE is installed cleanly! Feels like a reinstall, but your user settings and data are all still there. You can also rebase to something from Project uBlue, which offers custom images, like a SteamDeck-clone, different kernels, Cinnamon desktop, and so on…
• Huge software repository. You (should) never install .rpm s directly to your system, you use containers. Flatpak is great, but Distrobox even more! You can access the AUR too if you want and use those apps just like natively.
• And so on

I think reinstalling Debian might be the best solution in this situation.

I just Google “user not in sudoers Debian” and copy everything into a terminal - after booting into the Root shell - and forget about it.

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