J Leslie Turriff composed on 2025-09-25 21:10 (UTC-0500):
I'm considering switching from openSUSE to Debian. I have several encrypted partitions in a separate storage volume that I would like to mount in /home. Can the Debian installer do that without reformatting them? (openSUSE's YaST installer once could do that but no longer does, one of several reasons for moving away from openSUSE.)
No Debian installer has ever prevented me from creating non-standard mount points and choosing existing filesystems to mount there, much less forcing format of existing filesystems with data on them. Debian is neither Mint nor Ubuntu, not filled with kitchen sink junk. It's fully capable of doing what /needs/ doing.
Mine all have a bunch of such locations in fstab.
11 PCs so far have Forky upgrades from Trixie, which were made from Bookworm, which were made from Bullseye, or even farther back originally.
Debian's package management system is no less competent than openSUSE's, though I do far and away prefer zypper and rpm. I haven't done a fresh installation of Debian since probably around v11, so probably about 4 years ago when I last bought a brand new motherboard with NVME. Upgrades from version to version have been a reliable breeze over the years on the 40+ computers I have with Debian on them.
Like Curt wrote, creating those mount points and setting up their use is easily and safely enough done post-installation, no GUI needed.
What I do do when installing Debian, is minimalist, by appending the following parameters (among others) to the installer's boot command line:
tasks=standard base-installer/install-recommends=false \ GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true
This avoids the bloat of Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Cinnamon or any other desktops, giving free reign to TDE to do whatever it pleases. :) My Debians all have TDE, and no other "DE" but IceWM, as super lightweight tester+fallback.
Note that all my computers, except one laptop given me already setup, are configured with static network setup on ethernet, nothing wireless. For the past 3 or more years all, including openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Mageia and more, have been using systemd-networkd to the exclusion of traditional methods and networking "managers". Each PC uses a copy of the very same config file in /etc/systemd/network/ in each installation, and same for /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts.