The Un-Tebian Guide — Tebian

The Philosophy of Zero Lock-In

The greatest fear of any power user is "OS Lock-In." You install a custom distro, you spend months configuring it, and then the maintainer disappears, or the project shifts direction, and you are stuck with a "fork" that has no future. Tebian is not a fork. It is a usability layer on top of Debian. Our most important feature is that you can delete us.

This guide provides a C-level technical breakdown of how Tebian isolates its components and the exact, step-by-step process to revert your machine to a 100% pure, stock Debian installation without losing a single personal file. This is the ultimate "Sovereign" guarantee.

1. Architectural Isolation: The ~/Tebian/ Pillar

Most distros scatter their configurations across /etc, /usr/share, and /var. If you want to "uninstall" their changes, you have to perform a surgical strike on your entire filesystem. Tebian uses a Pillar Isolation model. Everything that makes Tebian "Tebian" is stored in one place: ~/Tebian/.

When you run the desktop.sh installer, it doesn't "overwrite" your Debian system. It symlinks. Your ~/.config/sway/config is not a file; it is a pointer to ~/Tebian/configs/sway/config. This design choice is fundamental to our "Zero Lock-In" promise. By breaking the symlinks, you effectively "turn off" Tebian.

The Symlink Map

During a standard install, Tebian creates the following pointers:

Config: ~/.config/[app] -> ~/Tebian/configs/[app]
Scripts: ~/.local/bin/tebian-* -> ~/Tebian/scripts/tebian-*
Assets: ~/.local/share/backgrounds/tebian -> ~/Tebian/assets/wallpapers

Because the actual files live in /opt, your $HOME directory remains "clean" in the eyes of the Debian package manager (dpkg).

2. The Reversion Process: Step-by-Step

If you decide to return to pure Debian, the process is deterministic and safe. We have automated this in uninstall.sh, but for the "Universal" reader, here is the manual breakdown of what happens under the hood.

Step A: Breaking the Pointers

The first step is to remove the symlinks. This is a non-destructive action. It doesn't delete the Tebian code; it just stops your user session from using it. We use the find command to locate and remove any link pointing to ~/Tebian.

find ~ -maxdepth 3 -type l -lname '~/Tebian/*' -delete

At this moment, if you were to logout and back in, your Sway session would load the default Debian configs (or fail if they don't exist), but your data remains untouched.

Step B: Restoring the Defaults

Tebian makes very few changes to system-wide files in /etc, but we do touch /etc/apt/sources.list to ensure you have access to non-free-firmware. To revert, we restore the stock Debian sources list. This ensures that every future apt update is talking only to official Debian servers.

Step C: Package Purging

Tebian installs exactly 3-10 base packages (sway, fuzzel, mako, etc.). To revert, we perform a purge. In the Debian world, purge is more powerful than remove; it deletes the binaries AND the system-wide configuration files.

sudo apt purge sway fuzzel mako kitty waybar wob brightnessctl

Because these were official Debian packages to begin with, the system removes them cleanly. There are no "Tebian-specific" orphans left behind.

3. Data Integrity: Your Home is Yours

The most critical part of the "Un-Tebian" philosophy is that we never touch your personal data. Your Documents, Pictures, Downloads, and Projects are yours. Tebian doesn't use a custom home structure. We don't hide your data in "Tebian Cloud" folders. We use the standard XDG User Directories.

When you uninstall Tebian, your Projects/ folder (where your code lives) and your Archive/ (where your backups live) are completely ignored by the uninstaller. This is the difference between a "Distro" and a "Layer." A distro owns your partitions; a layer only owns its config.

4. The C-Level Audit: Verifying the Reversion

For the skeptical developer, how do you verify that Tebian is truly gone? You perform a system audit. Because we don't fork the kernel and we don't use a custom repo, there are no "foreign" packages to find. You can run:

apt-forktracer

This tool will show you any package that doesn't match the official Debian repositories. On a reverted Tebian system, this list will be empty. You are now running 100% pure Debian Stable.

The Persistence of Firmware

One caveat: If you used Tebian to install proprietary drivers (NVIDIA or Intel/AMD firmware), those files will remain in /lib/firmware. We choose to keep these during a standard uninstall because they are necessary for your hardware to function. If you want a 100% "Free Software" system (FSF style), you must manually remove the non-free-firmware packages.

Conclusion: Freedom is the Feature

Tebian is designed to be the "Greatest OS" because it respects your right to leave. We believe that if we provide enough value—speed, stability, and a beautiful C-based interface—you won't want to leave. But if you do, the door is wide open. You aren't "switching" back to Debian; you were always there. We just provided the view.