Debian: A SpeedBump on the Road to Innovation

Yeah, not the most salient of articles.

End users often don't understand striking a balance between stability and bleeding edge.

~Jeff

Quoting:I wonder if Canonical would agree with that assessment.

Debian, due to the nature of the project -- many developers, no corporate parent/overlord, democratic/meritocratic governance, strong traditions -- isn't going anywhere, making it a very sane and reliable choice on which to base a downstream distribution.

Well. if Debian is the first choice for jobs like this, they must be doing something right.

http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/183228/index.html

It seems a bit ridiculous to me to evaluate the speed of Debian development based on the state of Debian Stable. Stable development is purposely frozen in a certain state that has to have already proved itself. That's why it's called "Stable." I don't see where Unstable and Testing are so far behind the general state of Linux development. Unstable, and distributions based on it, are pretty much bleeding edge. Testing falls a bit behind during the freeze leading up to the next Stable, but not that much.

This seems like a case of criticizing a distribution for doing what it set out to do. If you don't like what they set out to do, then you're perfectly welcome to run Unstable, or a more friendly (and slightly more stable) distribution based on Unstable, or something different altogether.

I currently run various distributions for different reasons. Right now I don't have anything really bleeding edge running, but that could change at any time. I do have Debian Stable running on one machine at the moment, and it's not a bad distribution to use.

Quoting: I do have Debian Stable running on one machine at the moment, and it's not a bad distribution to use.

Like Steven, I've been running Wheezy for a few months now. No breakage so far, and no complaints whatsoever about performance. That's all I'm looking for in a distribution. The huge choice of packages ain't too bad, either.

I like Debian a lot, I just wish there was an effort to backport new versions of desktop environments like Xfce, KDE, and GNOME. Selfishly I wish the Xubuntu and Kubuntu packagers would abandon Ubuntu as a base and make the current desktops available for a stable x86 and x86_64 Debian base. Now I realize that I shouldn't expect this to happen and if I want latest and greatest Debian isn't for me, but I would love to see it happen.

@slacker_mike,

I know what you mean. Especially true for the e17 desktop. Sid repo still has 16.999.xxx version and won't get a 17.0.x until Wheezy is out of freeze.

However, if you are wanting the latest XFCE version to run in Wheezy, add the following to your sources list. I've done this with the stock Wheezy XFCE 64bit version, so it should work with the 32bit, as well. And, yes, I keep the added repo always enabled.

Quoting:# siduction

# XFCE4 xfcenext (amd64 / i386 )

deb http://packages.siduction.org/xfcenext unstable main

deb-src http://packages.siduction.org/xfcenext unstable main

They also have KDE next and RazorQt next. Alas, nothing for Gnome.

(I had to add the extra line feeds in the quotation for some odd reason to get the formatting correct.)

Thanks djohnston for the info. I didn't realize Siduction had a KDE next repo. Aside from the Ubuntu derivative PPAs I think the other distro who does this quite well is openSUSE. They always make the latest KDE and GNOME available to users of their stable releases a short time after the desktop is released.

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME_repositories

http://en.opensuse.org/KDE_repositories

I plan to try out GNOME 3.8 on openSUSE using the GNOME stable repo. According to Vincent Untz it is a week or two away.

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-gnome/2013-03/msg00013.html

Cool. I didn't even know that Debian had Enlightenment at all. I remember something about Enlightenment wanting $15 before they would give it out?

Oh well. Debian Sid has been my "desktop of choice" for.... ever.

@Bob_Robertson you are confusing the E17 (enlightenment) desktop with the Elive distribution. That operating system creator (which was the standard for E17 until I started up Bodhi) required users to "donate" before they could install the OS.

E17 is released under a BSD license and has always been free of charge.

~Jeff

Bob_Robertson wrote:Debian Sid has been my "desktop of choice" for.... ever.

And I thought I was crazy for running Slackware-current.

Thanks, Jeff. So many projects, so little brain! :^)

Gus, The only times that Sid has been trouble was during serious updates, such as the change from Xfree86 to Xorg, libc5 to libc6, and such.

There have been occasional annoyances, sure. I thin maybe twice I've said to my self, "Darn, this worked before the last update!"

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Debian Sid is at least as reliable than any other Linux distribution, and if it works just DON'T UPDATE IT! :^)

Bob_Robertson wrote:if it works just DON'T UPDATE IT! :^)

Boring. Where's the fun in that?

Debian GNU/Linux is the Swiss Army Knife of systems. You can make anything with it from a minimal installation that boots in seconds to a huge cluster of servers and clients. The wide choice of packages and the APT packaging system are icing on the cake. That ~1K Debian developers have a process for building a distro means we get all that for $0 and a bit of time configuring stuff. I played around with many distros but I've stuck with Debian because it has done everything I've asked with only a few tiny flaws that get fixed. I went with Wheezy way too early but problems were few. No regrets.

There are a few distros with similar credibility to Debian and most have been around a long time and learned from their mistakes. There is no unique recipe for building a distro and there are obviously several ways to go about it but I doubt any is better than Debian in getting the job done. I've introduced hundreds of users to Debian GNU/Linux and few cared whether it was Debian or a hole in the ground. They just knew that it was far more reliable than that stuff they were using before from M$. I knew that it took way less work to manage.

Hey!!! I thought we weren't supposed to discuss religion on LXer... Doesn't the church of debian qualify?!?!

Raise your hand if you screen-captured the April 1 Debian cat logo. (raises hand)

....and posted it on Facebook.

@Bob

Link?

If you insist.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=394126464028362&set=...

@Bob

Thx. Somehow I missed that. And, as I have 3 cats (& 1 son, he's the tall one), I may find use for it.