I should have believed the reviewer at dedoimedo when he reviewed Debian 9, but oh no I thought 9.5 might be like a Ubuntu point release and be much better.
After trying it virtualised I did a full install onto a portable hard drive. Lots of scary ACPI warnings and then it started o.k. First thing I noticed was how sluggish the XFCE desktop
seemed. I dragged the trash can from the top L/H of the screen down to the bottom R/H. Immediately the whole top panel disappeared along with the menu. I had not touched the panel at all!
Spent some time on Google trying to restore the panel - gave up! Right click was now the only way to get a menu. I started Synaptic which took a long long time to appear. I was able to install HPLIP and get my
printer going so that was nice. Anyway after about three hours I'd had enough. Every time I give Debian a try it turns out like this. I am absolutely sure that if I had been patient & prepared to spend a lot of time I would
have finished up with everything working nicely but why bother when Ubuntu, Mint, and other distros have done all the hard work for you? Debian is like buying a really good and expensive BBQ kitset - much assembly required!
Linux Mint is like buying the same BBQ & having someone assemble the BBQ & get it going for you! And other distros such as Xubuntu 16.04 are also very stable. I usually keep the DVD when I try a new distro but this damned Debian 9.5
DVD went into my rubbish bin. No wonder the guy at Dedoimedo was so angry!