It's OK not to like Debian ... but this article is lacking
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 31, 2013 5:27 PM EDT |
There are many, many alternatives to Debian for those who don't like (or won't tolerate) its methods and pace of development. Debian does not bring new technologies into the distribution -- especially the stable release -- until they have had their airing elsewhere. If that doesn't work for you, don't run Debian. Quoting:The Debian priesthood make their proclamations, anoint new members and continue to exert control of the pace of development with no interest in changing their software release management policy speed knob, currently set to: slow. Slow as in 'sloth' slow. How many other "slow" distributions are out there? There are many "fast" ones, so it's nice to have an alternative. Isn't RHEL also "slow"? For those who want a "faster" distribution, development-pace-wise, there's always Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu and many others. It would have been nice to see some citations and examples along with the complaining. |
| djohnston Mar 31, 2013 7:39 PM EDT |
What got me was this statement:Quoting:So, life goes on, with or without Debian. I wonder if Canonical would agree with that assessment. |
| HoTMetaL Mar 31, 2013 8:30 PM EDT |
And I wonder if this is yet another early jump on April 1. If so, brilliantly played. Edit: On second glance, this is the same empty head who wrote The Linux Desktop Mess. So this guy actually believes this stuff he writes. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 01, 2013 8:48 AM EDT |
Yeah, not the most salient of articles. |
| Jeff91 Apr 01, 2013 9:45 AM EDT |
End users often don't understand striking a balance between stability and bleeding edge. ~Jeff |
| Steven_Rosenber Apr 02, 2013 12:38 AM EDT |
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. |
| BernardSwiss Apr 02, 2013 1:43 AM EDT |
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 |
| CFWhitman Apr 02, 2013 12:37 PM EDT |
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. |
| djohnston Apr 02, 2013 3:03 PM EDT |
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. |
| slacker_mike Apr 02, 2013 5:01 PM EDT |
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. |
| djohnston Apr 02, 2013 6:54 PM EDT |
@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 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.) |
| slacker_mike Apr 02, 2013 8:23 PM EDT |
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 |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 03, 2013 8:34 AM EDT |
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. |
| Jeff91 Apr 03, 2013 10:45 AM EDT |
@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 |
| gus3 Apr 03, 2013 11:09 AM EDT |
Bob_Robertson wrote:Debian Sid has been my "desktop of choice" for.... ever.And I thought I was crazy for running Slackware-current. |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 03, 2013 1:43 PM EDT |
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! :^) |
| gus3 Apr 03, 2013 2:27 PM EDT |
Bob_Robertson wrote:if it works just DON'T UPDATE IT! :^)Boring. Where's the fun in that? |
| pogson Apr 03, 2013 6:52 PM EDT |
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. |
| JaseP Apr 03, 2013 7:28 PM EDT |
Hey!!! I thought we weren't supposed to discuss religion on LXer... Doesn't the church of debian qualify?!?! |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 04, 2013 8:59 AM EDT |
Raise your hand if you screen-captured the April 1 Debian cat logo. (raises hand) ....and posted it on Facebook. |
| DrGeoffrey Apr 04, 2013 10:26 AM EDT |
@Bob Link? |
| Bob_Robertson Apr 04, 2013 10:50 AM EDT |
If you insist. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=394126464028362&set=... |
| DrGeoffrey Apr 04, 2013 5:51 PM EDT |
@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. |
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