Interesting timing: I wrote about why Debian isn't for me

Story: 7 Reasons Why Debian is the Dominant Linux DistroTotal Replies: 35
Author Content
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
1:36 PM EDT
I hadn't seen Bruce Byfield's piece when I wrote this morning about why I ditched Debian. I've tried it several times over the last 17 years and have never been happy with it. It will show up in the newswire soon, but here is why it wasn't for me: http://thelinuxworks.blogspot.com/2016/01/goodbye-debian-81....

FWIW, Debian may be dominant in Mr. Byfield's mind, but in the real world, at least in business, Red Hat is dominant, followed distantly by SUSE. IME on personal systems Ubuntu is still the most popular, with Linux Mint probably the next most popular choice.
JaseP

Jan 08, 2016
2:07 PM EDT
Debian is a very good distribution to build a desktop distro from,... but ironically, it's not a very good one itself. I remember back in about 2008, that I was having trouble getting Ubuntu to recognize the correct display settings for my TV (VGA input), and it was cr@pping the bed. Debian came to the rescue in that regard,... but once Ubuntu managed to get things straight, I switched back... Debian just wasn't up to the task of being a decent desktop environment. Everything (other than that one issue) was just too hard to get set up right.

Debian has the makings of an excellent server distro, though. I'm presently taking the self training for the Linux Foundation LFCS cert, and am using the materials on Debian based distros (which is, ironically, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server Edition). Setting up and maintaining a server is just so much easier with dpkg/apt-get than with an RPM based distro.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
2:14 PM EDT
I completely disagree about RPM, which I far prefer to dpkg. The rest of what you say is essentially what I would have said a few years back. Debian has gotten better and it is easier to setup than ever before. Having said that, it still gets lots of little things wrong. The problems with repository management are the only issue I ran into which I consider at all major.

FWIW, I completely disagree about RPM, which I far prefer to dpkg. Considering the Red Hat and SUSE utterly dominate the business world, at least in North America, knowledge of rpm based systems is pretty much vital for a Linux professional in any case.
dotmatrix

Jan 08, 2016
2:47 PM EDT
@caitlynm:

>I completely disagree about RPM, which I far prefer to dpkg.

I suspect this is your major complaint with Debian.

I run Debian on everything -- never have the problems you point out. Debian is also the distro I installed first... a long long time ago. Typically people use what they know, and rpm v. dpkg is enough of a difference to drive anyone buggy.

At this point in desktop GNU/Linux distro-land there are very few glaring issues between the mainstream choices -- unless you want to start a systemd flame-war -- which I don't, but it's fun to watch.

I suppose for Debian, there should probably be a warning label on 'stable' that the default software is probably quite old. 'Testing' has many of the latest software releases.

In any case, my feelings for rpm based distros just about mirrors your feelings on dpkg based distros.

Use what you know. Desktop GNU/Linux is about user choice and preferences. No need to argue rpm v. dpkg -- it's not 1994 anymore.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
2:51 PM EDT
Um... I explained why I wasn't happy with Debian in the post I wrote, which is now on the newswire as well as linked above. It has nothing to do with dpkg and I wasn't arguing about packaging systems. Please don't make assumptions. I ran into issues which can only be described as bugs or problems.

For me systemd is a plus, so that wasn't it either.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
2:54 PM EDT
Quoting:Debian is a very good distribution to build a desktop distro from,... but ironically, it's not a very good one itself.
When I said that about Slackware in a review years back hat community was ready to hand me my head. There are some people there and even on LXer who are still hostile to me because I dared say that their favorite distro has flaws. Show me one distro that doesn't have flaws. I haven't found it yet. Slackware, IMHO, has some really glaring ones. Debian's community is far more tolerant and responds better to criticism: they fix the problems.
dotmatrix

Jan 08, 2016
3:32 PM EDT
@caitlynm:

Is there a possibility you could post the installation machine's specs?

In your blog post you refer to problems with Iceweasel, and then mention that Firefox simply works...

It's unclear if you installed the latest Firefox on the machine.

In your blog post you refer to "some very ordinary things" that are missing from the Debian repo...

It's unclear what these items might be.

In your blog post you refer to pulseaudio and maintaining the default sink ports. However, you also were using LXDE rather than the distro default of Gnome. There is a package here:

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/pavucontrol

which should have allowed you to easily set pulseaudio preferences.

It's unclear from your post if you installed the various components necessary to do what you wished to do. My experience with various distros has been... if you change the default window manager, you're on your own - and expect certain kinds of things to be hunted down and configured by hand.

I'm not trying to say that you didn't do things 'correctly' -- whatever that means -- I'm simply pointing out that your blog post reads much more like a rant, of which I have written *many*, than a review and it's very difficult to discern where the problems might have been.

On pulseaudio:

I typically run openbox as my window manager, and configure pulseaudio through the handy CLI...
cybertao

Jan 08, 2016
3:41 PM EDT
I like Debian have used it for long periods as my desktop over the years. It's been my choice for some VPSs I maintain. Having said that, it's far to conservative. Stable is getting outdated at the start of it's release cycle and seems ancient by the end of it, even testing can seem restrictive. It's boring, but then that's often a good thing in a desktop if it does everything you need to get work done.

An interesting point raised was packaging. Debian has a wide range of packages available and that used to be one of it's drawcards. Something I'd heard a while back is trouble finding maintainers for them all, it's possible Debian is in decline because it's just not glamorous enough despite how important it has been and continues to be to the GNU/Linux eco-system. Ubuntu will possibly take up the slack if that's true...but do we really want that? Canonical has very different goals to the Debian Project.

catlynm wrote:When I said that about Slackware in a review years back hat community was ready to hand me my head. There are some people there and even on LXer who are still hostile to me because I dared say that their favorite distro has flaws.
I tried Slackware myself for +6 months and found it to be highly over-rated. Not awful, and a project I'm glad is there for the users who like it. Just not for me. Most of its momentum is based on hype with a touch of pretentiousness.
dotmatrix

Jan 08, 2016
4:21 PM EDT
@cybertao:

>Stable is getting outdated at the start of it's release cycle and seems ancient by the end of it, even testing can seem restrictive.

Agree.

>it's possible Debian is in decline because

Distrowatch shows Debian as #2 under Mint and above Ubuntu. So, if you believe the numbers, I'm not sure I know what it means to 'be in decline'...

On the server side dpkg systems pretty much dominate:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

Again... if you believe the numbers -- which are certainly debatable.

My thoughts on the numbers: It really doesn't matter. All that matters to me is that FOSS is increasing software freedom for more users -- and it is.
cybertao

Jan 08, 2016
4:28 PM EDT
dotmatrix wrote:Distrowatch shows Debian as #2 under Mint and above Ubuntu. So, if you believe the numbers, I'm not sure I know what it means to 'be in decline'...
In regards to package maintenance. Debian has always been a powerhouse for it, and still may or may not be, which is why I mentioned it. Mint and Ubuntu being derivatives of it shows how important the Debian Project is...and their popularity over Debian confirms my bias that Debian isn't seen as glamorous enough. It would be wonderful if Mint users started supporting the Debian based version over the more common Ubuntu based version.
jdixon

Jan 08, 2016
4:55 PM EDT
> Show me one distro that doesn't have flaws. I haven't found it yet.

Well, on that we can agree completely.

> Slackware, IMHO, has some really glaring ones.

We've been there and done that. The relevant exchanges should be available in the archives if anyone wants to read them. :)

Slackware tries to be fast and stable, and does its best to leave the user in control. That's what its users like about it. It's missing some "user friendly" features that some consider essential, and it makes no real effort to be "enterprise ready" (or what ever the term of the month is). The combination of those two things renders it unsuitable for a significant portion of users.

BTW Caitlyn, nice to see you back. Whether I agree or disagree with you, you add a unique perspective to the conversations.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
6:07 PM EDT
First, to dotmatrix, my blog post reads like a rant because IT IS A RANT. That is deliberate. The fact that a distro can make me rant in 2016 is reason enough to be disgusted, and I wasn't quite to disgusted yet.

I have pavucontrol installed. That's exactly how I set it to line out rather than headphones after every single boot. The settings wouldn't stay.

A distro should just work regardless of the desktop environment. Many (most?) support multiple environments. I wanted lightweight so I chose LXDE. If that's the wrong choice somehow then Debian shouldn't offer it. As it is there is a supported LXDE install image and there are supported packages. Nobody should be forced to use the default desktop to get desired results.

Ancient machine specs: 1.6GHz AMD Athlon 2650e CPU, 4GB RAM, onboard nVidia GeForce 6150 SE video If you need any more details I'll be happy to provide them.

cybertao: One of the big problems which I detailed was shoddy packaga/repository management. If this is still a "powerhouse", well, everyone else seems to be doing better lately. Even itty bitty Vector Linux has reasonable package management that doesn't have the level of issues with the default browser that Debian has. Granted, that's a smaller repo. I'll take working over big any day.

jdixon: Thanks for your kind words. I never really left. I've just been really busy. Regarding "enterprise ready", many companies have to meet all sorts of compliance standards these days. Enterprise distros have the required tools to meet any and all security standards that are common at this time. Slackware could certainly do that, considering they have an excellent reputation for both stability and timely patching. They just choose not to.

gary_newell

Jan 08, 2016
7:06 PM EDT
Caitlynm, I agree with you.

I wrote an article last year called 3 ways to improve Debian and I haven't even booted it yet (http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2015/06/3-ways-to-improve-d...). I got slated by Debian folks for that article but my points were that:

1. The website is a nightmare to navigate 2. Live images aren't UEFI bootable (they weren't at the time, I don't know if they now are) 3. There are too many screens as part of the installer.

They may seem minor points but just to get it up and running takes more effort than other distributions.

I think as pointed out by other people it is a great distribution to use as a base for other distributions but for most desktop users there are already other distributions that do more of what they need without having to install Debian and jump through the same hoops and work out the same codec, hardware and other issues.

It isn't that Debian is that bad to use, it is just why would I use it when there are other distros that do what I want in a better way.
jdixon

Jan 08, 2016
7:48 PM EDT
> They just choose not to.

Yep. That's not a market Patrick or the other Slackware devs seem to be interested in pursuing. I can understand why though. Red Hat, SuSE, and Ubuntu pretty well have the market cornered. Why would they want to try to compete there? If someone else wanted to offer a modified "enterprise ready" Slackware, I doubt they would mind, though they would want them to change the name.

> ....it is just why would I use it when there are other distros that do what I want in a better way.

There's no reason you would, or should. That's the case with Slackware for at the very least the majority of users nowadays too. There are Slackware derivatives that they would find much more usable (Salix seems to be the most popular one). Caitlyn, is Vector Linux still using a Slackware base? I understand they were debating whether to switch to something else or not, and their page doesn't mention it.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
8:04 PM EDT
jdixon: VectorLinux abandoned the Slackware base with version 7.0. They have a buildbot and build everything from scratch. You can find plenty of things in Vector which point to their Slackware derivative legacy, but at this point it's a fully independently developed distro that forked from Slackware a few years back. The interesting thing is that a lot of core developers that I knew are long gone but their community was and is big enough that other people were there who could step up. With the new build infrastructure, which took quite some time to develop, they can churn things out pretty quickly. 7.2 is in alpha now.
cybertao

Jan 08, 2016
9:38 PM EDT
gary_newell wrote:I think as pointed out by other people it is a great distribution to use as a base for other distributions but for most desktop users there are already other distributions that do more of what they need without having to install Debian and jump through the same hoops and work out the same codec, hardware and other issues.
This is one of Debian's strengths, not a weakness. They make a strong and clear distinction between free and non-free software. Some software is illegal in various countries because of patent and licensing issues, the interests of free-software are not advanced by the likes of Mint which perpetuates the problem by encouraging people to continue using them (illegally in some cases) without awareness or consideration.

I find it remarkable how many people must install proprietary graphics drivers, patent encumbered codecs, licensed proprietary software such as Skype and Steam, and then expose how their choice to use free-software offers better privacy, security, and stability over proprietary alternatives. Without those things they would rather just go back to using Windows.
flufferbeer

Jan 08, 2016
10:00 PM EDT
@dotmatrix

>>it's possible Debian is in decline because

> Distrowatch shows Debian as #2 under Mint and above Ubuntu. So, if you believe the numbers, I'm not sure I know what it means to 'be in decline'...

I fully agree, and I'd agree with those numbers too.... DEFINITELY NOT happenstance! Seems to me that Debain itself hasn't succumbed to the blatant corporitization that the RedHat mothership (and their vocal and supposedly "neutral" mouthpiece caitlynm) unashamedly tout. And Mint has succeeded beyund all bounds at Distrowatch DESPITE the continual advocacy of the CanUBecomical mothership and its Baboontu fanbois.

One thing I'd seriously ding Debian for is their stooping down to heavily incorporate the lousy systemd and all its interwining dependency evolutions into Jessie and above. As the original Stars Wars' Darth Vader might say to Debian and ALL its derivatives "The systemDark Side is your Destiny..."

Again, i certainly wouldn't so readily discount the DW numbers -- as they are coming from more of a REAL neutral party instead of one heavily "influenced" by the RH(====>Fedora,CentOS) or CanUBecomical mucky-mucks.

My 2c
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
10:00 PM EDT
Yeah, isn't it terrible that people need specific apps to get their work done, particularly when there is no acceptable FOSS alternative. It's much better to use a truly "free" distro that lacks basic functionality but "protects" them from the "evils" of proprietary software.

Yes, that's dripping sarcasm. I have never been an FSF/Stahlman purist. Quite the contrary. I'm a pragmatist. I use the best tools to get the job done. Yes, I must use a proprietary video driver because without it, with nouveau, I get freeze ups and glitches and all sorts of nastiness. If I use the legacy proprietary nVidia driver it just works. Debian, incidentally, packages that driver and puts it in non-free, which is why the FSF doesn't consider it a free distro. If they really were strict about that "strength" it would be utterly unusable to me.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
10:04 PM EDT
You know, Ladislav Bodnar, the owner of Distrowatch, says the page hit rankings don't mean much. They tell you what's popular with DW readers, which tend to be enthusiasts and hobbyists. To me the best measure is a tech job board. Look at the want ads and see what distros are in demand. Oh, and yeah, I do this for a living, so I need to use Red Hat and SUSE since they dominate the real world market in the U.S. Oh, and yeah, I support Red Hat, or more correctly, I don't bite the hand that feeds me. Sure, I'm biased -- in favor of things that work and make a living for me. Clearly, though, the mocking language and derision of the post a couple up from this one is clearly bias free. #smh
cybertao

Jan 08, 2016
10:24 PM EDT
caitynm wrote:Yes, I must use a proprietary video driver because without it, with nouveau, I get freeze ups and glitches and all sorts of nastiness. If I use the legacy proprietary nVidia driver it just works.
And who's fault is it that nouveau is so bad, leaving you little option but to use the proprietary driver? If anything it should make you think twice before purchasing hardware that uses nvidea chipsets in the future - unless you don't mind being dependent on them for support and have complete faith in their integrity. Users who aren't aware of the situation will blame Linux for any problems nvidea's driver causes them, or rubbish a distribution for not catering to the needs of proprietary software.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
10:30 PM EDT
I expect an OS to work on commodity hardware. The system in question was a loss leader in 2009. I bought it new for $150 then, on closeout, and it served me very well. Bottom line: if Linux doesn't work on run of the mill hardware nobody will use it. That goes for home systems as well as business. Which video manufacture puts FSF purity first and makes everything open? Oh, right, there isn't one. So, yeah, it's up to the developers of nouveau to make it work or else the distributors will do exactly what Debian does: include something that does work.

BTW, when it comes to end user, consumer Linux nobody is mentioning the two most popular distros: Android and ChromeOS. Both come preloaded and are in stores. Nothing to install. No in depth knowledge needed.
cybertao

Jan 08, 2016
10:33 PM EDT
caitlynm wrote:So, yeah, it's up to the developers of nouveau to make it work or else the distributors will do exactly what Debian does: include something that does work.
I'm sure they would if nvidea were a little more helpful and a little less anti-competitive. The blame lies squarely with nvidea and the consumers who choose to support them.

If you expect an OS to work on commodity hardware, try the commodity OS the hardware was originally designed to run. That's what vendor lock-in is all about.
caitlynm

Jan 08, 2016
10:37 PM EDT
Funny, I don't feel locked in. My system has already outlived it's expected life and works well. Again, you are arguing ideology, and it's an ideology I just don't subscribe to. That probably puts me in a minority position here and I am fine with that.
dotmatrix

Jan 08, 2016
11:46 PM EDT
@caitlynm:

Android and ChromeOS are not GNU/Linux distros. That's like saying MacOSx is a BSD/Mach distro... sorry - I don't buy that logic. Google would use any available 'free' kernel that made sense [and cents] for its AdwareOSes.

In any case, assuming you have HDMI audio as sink 0 and your analog audio card as sink 1:

pacmd

set-sink-port 1 analog-output-lineout

CTRL+d
Log out, Log in, Done.

Or something of the like should solve your audio problems.

Or you could create a config file for your profile.

man pulse-client.conf

The PulseAudio client library reads configuration directives from a file ~/.config/pulse/client.conf on startup and when that file doesn't exist from /etc/pulse/client.conf.

## Configuration file for PulseAudio clients. See pulse-client.conf(5) for ## more information. Default values are commented out. Use either ; or # for ## commenting.

; default-sink = ; default-source =


It's tempting to point out that pulseaudio is a Poettering+RH thing [integrated into Fedora8], and so the people who work in the 'real world' using RH probably already know this minor tidbit... but... Oops! I think I just did.

/sarc :-þ
mbaehrlxer

Jan 09, 2016
12:21 AM EDT
Quoting:I chose LXDE. If that's the wrong choice somehow then Debian shouldn't offer it.


i expect just the opposite. i want distributions to offer me all that is available, whether it is good or bad, just so that i can try it out. if it doesn't work i choose another.

while it would be nice to have everything work perfectly, that is a tough order, and i doubt that there is any one distribution that offers more than one fully supported, well integrated desktop environment.

to use debian with LXDE i'd look for a debian derivative that uses that as its default distribution.

consider the alternative. if distributions only offered fully working and supported packages, then half of the packages in every distribution would have to be thrown out, and many applications would never reach end users.

for any less popular application i would have to go out and build it from source. distributions were created to avoid exactly that kind of problem. even you found packages missing in debian.

the issues in your rant mostly stand on their own. i haven't used debian on a desktop for almost 10 years now, so i can't compare.

i have a few questions though: did you compare the same versions of iceweasel and firefox? i have the impression that firefox improved a lot in recent versions, so i wonder if the problem wasn't simply that iceweasel was to old.

is there anyone who doesn't have problems with pulseaudio? for you it's the settings, for me it is not coping with high load on the machine (when alsa works just fine)

greetings, eMBee.
dotmatrix

Jan 09, 2016
12:37 AM EDT
@mbaehrlxer:

Agree on the LXDE decision matrix.

>is there anyone who doesn't have problems with pulseaudio? for you it's the settings, for me it is not coping with high load on the machine (when alsa works just fine)

PA is great if you have the overhead. I think it even automatically 'yields' to JACK if JACK is running. Many of the problems I've seen people run into with PA is the lack of a non-Gnome GUI application that enables full feature control. The CLI is really a lot of fun to play with -- and maybe someone with better programming skills than me will create a WM agnostic GUI for PA.

It's really a shame... PA, systemd, etc... have a tremendous amount of configuration customizations available, but the GNOME developers remove nearly all of them from the GUIs ?!? It's like having a car that can turn into a helicopter but no way to reach the button.

Aesthetic. Bah! Give me control - forget the pretty icons.
jdixon

Jan 09, 2016
9:14 AM EDT
> And who's fault is it that nouveau is so bad, leaving you little option but to use the proprietary driver?

In a recent install I preformed (a Dell Optiplex 740 with onboard NVidia graphics), yes. Without the proprietary drivers the machine would lock up multiple times per day.
jdixon

Jan 09, 2016
1:02 PM EDT
> jdixon: VectorLinux abandoned the Slackware base with version 7.0.

Thanks, Caitlyn. I had a faint memory that was the case, but couldn't remember for certain.
cr

Jan 09, 2016
3:37 PM EDT
@dotmatrix: Speaking as someone who's coded a (very) minor app for gtk/Gnome1... Anybody who codes to Gnome now is circling the drain waiting for the next piece of functionality to get removed "for your own good", breaking anything that uses it.

Qt/KDE is a whole other bag of worms (especially with me preferring TDE), which leaves... what? I try to stick to Perl/Tk wherever possible because Perl is universal and Tk nearly so and, to misquote Tim Burton, "It's ancient... It's ugly... And it ain't going nowhere." Checkboxes, sliders and radio knobs might look like Star Wars in one DE and Studebaker dashboard in another, but they work.
kikinovak

Jan 09, 2016
7:25 PM EDT
+++ Caitlyn Martin drops Debian +++ Wall Street experts nervous +++ NASDAQ loses 3 % +++
CFWhitman

Jan 10, 2016
2:46 PM EDT
As to the problem with sound defaulting to headphones rather than line out, that is entirely strange if you don't have headphones plugged in. The default setting in every Debian installation I have had (generally all either Xfce or LXDE) is either line-out in desktops or speakers in laptops. If you always have headphones plugged in, then you have to turn off the headphone detect switch if you want to change the default from headphones. That seems to be true in every distribution I've run recently, though. I admit though, that most of the ones I've run on a desktop where I would run into the issue are based on Debian directly or on Ubuntu.

I haven't had the issues mentioned in the article with Debian. However, I find that Debian takes a lot more configuration to use as a desktop than many distributions that are aimed specifically for desktop use. Though I haven't had a lot of trouble with Iceweasel, it is fairly easy to run Firefox from your home directory in Debian, and it will find any local Flash install you might have as well as updating itself automatically if you let it. I actually use this method to run Firefox Developer Edition on other distirbutions.

Debian and Debian based distributions tend to be lighter than Ubuntu based distributions and not as light as Slackware based ones. Of course distributions tailored to be lightweight can easily buck this trend. I haven't used Vector recently (the last time I used it, it was still based on Slackware). As a nice lightweight Slackware based distribution I have found Salix Fluxbox 14.1 to work pretty well and be quite easy to use. Of course, it doesn't have extensive repositories, which tends to be the weakness of more independent distributions. If you want to build a lot of your own packages, though, it was very predictable on Slackware and its derivatives the last time I tried, more so than other distributions in my experience.

Edit: Incidentally, when Bruce talks about Debian being the dominant distribution, he doesn't mean just Debian installations. He means Debian and Debian based distributions, like Ubuntu and Mint.
dotmatrix

Jan 10, 2016
3:19 PM EDT
@CFWhitman:

>Though I haven't had a lot of trouble with Iceweasel,

The OP's processor is a single core 1.6 GHz CPU. The processor was sold as a competitor to the Intel Atom... AKA -- netbook.

If the OP's plan was to run a 'heavy' web browser such as Firefox and be able to open more than one tab or multi-task at all, the expectation should be what the OP discovered... slow and poor performance with lock-ups and possible memory thrashing...

I would truly say that most of the complaints have little or nothing to do with Debian and much more to do with the OP's misplaced expectation that the chosen machine would be able to run the chosen program set.

So... the OP then switched to Vector Linux. I suppose the "Light Edition" which has LXDE and Opera as default WM and browser, but it's still rather unclear which browser the OP is currently running on the machine.

BTW: the original Raspbian -- which has a more suitable software selection for a low spec machine -- ran Midori as the default browser.
caitlynm

Jan 10, 2016
3:33 PM EDT
dotmatrix: Funny, my "misplaced expectation" is fully met by Vector Linux at the moment. I'm writing this in Firefox with a dozen windows open. No slowdown at all, no swallowing of 100% of CPU. Perhaps an older machine, particularly on a distro that people are touting in this thread as lightweight, is the best way to test performance. FWIW, I m running Vector Linux 64-bit standard edition with XFCE, not LXDE. My current browser is the latest and greatest Firefox. Again, no problems. I also expect, at some point, to get CentOS 7.2 running on this machine because I mainly support Red Hat for work.

FWIW, I always install Midori. There are some website I use where Midori just doesn't work properly, which is why Firefox, which is almost always a supported browser, is necessary.

BTW, I just love when someone tells me I'm doing it wrong and Debian is just fine. Despite this, somehow, other distros just work without the same problems, but it's all clearly my fault.

CFWhitman: I've had nothing but good experiences with SalixOS. I have a 14 year old Toshiba Libretto L2 that almost never gets used, but it does have SalixOS 14.1 with the non-PAE kernel, and it works. (The Libretto has a Transmeta Crusoe processor, so no PAE support is available.)

Aww... kikinovak still hates me and still, after all this time, finds a reason to attack me in each and every thread and article I post. I'm touched. It's nice to know I am so very important to you. Keep your venom strong.
cybertao

Jan 10, 2016
3:53 PM EDT
There's not need to get emotional about the emotional reactions to your emotionally driven article.
caitlynm

Jan 10, 2016
5:16 PM EDT
Emotionally driven article? Trying something for four months and writing up the experience is not driven by emotion.
dotmatrix

Jan 10, 2016
6:19 PM EDT
I suppose we can all just agree that Debian is at fault here... I know I'm convinced.

On the lighter side:

It's too bad that Crunchbang is no longer around. I haven't tried out its replacement 'BunsenLabs':

https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

I suppose I'll need to take it for a spin. Oh... oh yeah... I almost forgot, it's Debian based -- probably just full of bugs.

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