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7 Reasons Why Debian is the Dominant Linux Distro
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Comments (36)
16 earlier comments in the full thread.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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:
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.
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
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
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
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.
@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.
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.
> 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.
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: 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.
Thanks, Caitlyn. I had a faint memory that was the case, but couldn't remember for certain.
@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.
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.
+++ Caitlyn Martin drops Debian +++ Wall Street experts nervous +++ NASDAQ loses 3 % +++
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.
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.
@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.
>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.
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.
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.
There's not need to get emotional about the emotional reactions to your emotionally driven article.
Emotionally driven article? Trying something for four months and writing up the experience is not driven by emotion.
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.
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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>>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