Debian is one of the oldest active distros around and is the 'parent' for many child distros: you can argue the entire Ubuntu family tree descends ultimately from Debian, too. It's therefore good to know that Niente is a first-class citizen on Debian and all its progeny: indeed, Niente Version 4 was developed on Debian 12 (using KDE).
The only real point of weirdness as far as Niente-on-Debian is concerned arises (potentially) from the fact that, by default, the non-root user created when installing Debian itself does not get given sudo privileges. That's a problem for Niente, because it needs to access the /usr/bin folder, which requires elevated privileges: without them, the installation would fail. Accordingly, Niente tests for the existence of sudo privileges and, if it finds them, proceeds exactly as it would do on any other distro. If it discovers that you lack sudo privileges, however, then it will ask you to supply the root user password first. With root privileges acquired, it will add you to the /etc/sudoers file. With that done, the Niente installer can then ask you to supply your own password to access your new sudo privileges. After that, everything proceeds normally. This makes for a fairly clumsy 'two-password' installation process, but is a necessary evil!
Just be warned, therefore, that on Debian, a line will be added to the /etc/sudoers file that grants the user installing Niente full sudo rights on the system. That may not be something you want to live with permanently, in which case you should run visudo after the Niente installation completes and remove that extra line. Niente does not need sudo privileges to run under normal circumstances: it simply needs them to be installed, so revoking sudo privileges post-install is perfectly fine. That said, sudo privileges will be needed in future to update Niente with any point releases that may be made available.
For this article, I'm using Debian 12 and the LXQt desktop environment, but it's been tested on Debian 12 with KDE, Gnome and XFCE too.
As with all these installation articles, I assume a fresh, default installation of the underlying operating system. I always assume, however, that any installer-provided options to install third-party programs, drivers or audio codec support are taken: not that it makes any difference to the way Niente works, but I just like to be clear on what my working assumptions are 🙂