It was about time to get a new laptop and upgrade my main computer. My requirements were for a SSD hard drive for speed, 32 Gigs of RAM, a HD resolution for the screen alongside a recomended brand for Debian linux. So I ended up buying a Dell XPS 15 9560 from ebay for around £250 with delivery. It arrived promptly and I soon set it up, pressing F2 to enter the BIOS and changing the boot order to USB first.

I made a bootable USB stick with the latest version of Debian, number 13 codename Trixie, and was installing it in what seemed like minutes. A full partition of the 1 TB Hard drive and windows was removed, the only slight issue was the need for the non-free firmware for the Wireless car, but I have a USB Stick with this on from previous installs, so I was booting into the latest version of Debian.

My setup process plan was to update my Ansible repository to install as much as possible. I started this repo 2 years ago, and in the meantime a number of apps have been removed from the debian repo, I have also changed the way I work a lot and the new world of AI has really taken off.

The biggest change with Debian 13 and my Ansible repo, is the end of the 'apt-key' install method. So I have updated the Ansible repo with a new tasks list with the new way of installing apps Ansible New Roles without apt-key. I also created a new All Packages Yaml file to install everything from my Debian 12 previous install, which required me to remove a number of apps which have been removed.

One of the big changes was setting up the new High definition 3840x2160 pixel screen which is far larger than the previous 1920x1080 pixel screen. This included chaning the defaults in the Appearance, Display, Desktop and QT5/QT6 settings as the defaults were tiny.

Copying over the files from the old laptop to the new Dell laptop took a while from the backup, but I am almost there.

Now I have a far more powerful laptop running with Debian 13 and have really enjoyed the process to setup my new laptop. There are a few more things to install, like teamviewer, Zed editor and mysql, which i havent got to install with ansible. but i hope this helps you if you have discovered this post.

Please comment if you find this Ansible repo useful, what else should I add to it and what should I remove?

If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon