For sure, and with even a teensy bit of reflection I think most people would agree that people are generally quite shit at expressing themselves with words. We say things we don’t mean or imply things we didn’t intend to all the time. A well written book or article takes hundreds of hours of re-writing and getting feedback and re-writing again just to try to communicate the author’s idea effectively. Snap judgments based on social media posts alone are pretty baseless.
We judge others more harshly than ourselves or our friends and family, it’s often a tribal artifact of the environment our species grew up and evolved in through its infancy that has in part informed our acceptable behaviors as a social species who relies on groups for survival (justice, altruism, fairness, social contract, etc).
Sometimes it’s hyperbole, sometimes it’s incorrectly treating people different than ourselves as less than instead of different to, and sometimes someone violates common morality so abjectly that capital punishment is a popular acceptable outcome.
Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.
I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.
Tumbleweed includes the YaST package manager with all the repository priority settings that make sense in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to use it.
You can run zypper up which is a standard updating method in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to do that. More than half the zypper options make no sense in TW.
That’s the stuff I mean by “derivative”. They built on a Leap base and modified it into a rolling release.
If it was truly designed as a new, independent rolling release distro, they’d have taken those things out, packaged a different version of zypper or at least a different manpage.
For years I used Debian. Because it worked, but also because Debian looked to me to be the purest and most solid FOSS distro. That is, it’s not run by a for-profit company, and it isn’t a derivative that will go away one day. It looked - still looks - like the “universal” Linux distro, which I believe is even its motto.
Firstly, is that assessment justified?
Next: the problem. A few years ago I read a disturbing report about the behind-the-scenes dysfunction at Debian. Specifically:
a serious dearth of maintainers
lots of very outdated packages with possible untreated security holes
silly political wrangling by Debian insiders - one representative allegation was that more time was being spent debating the positioning of a Black Lives Matter logo on the Debian site than on the technical challenges just mentioned
Possibly this was disinformation by someone with a scurrilous agenda. I want it not to be true because I believe Linux needs a flagship FOSS distro and Debian is the obvious candidate.
Can anyone set the record straight? Because when I had to do a new install I went with Ubuntu (LTS), and this was partly inspired by the above. I would really like all this to be wrong and to know that Debian is on the right path.
I looked behind the scenes quite a bit in Debian and what you say mirrors what I saw. The project is very political and does suffer from a serious lack of man-(and woman-)power in many areas. If you do want to help, you’re almost immediately hampered by the community’s Byzantine structure.
If that puts you off, Arch is a more dynamic project that’s easier to get into as a maintainer. But it’s also organized with a more hierarchical and less democratic structure.
Additionally, you’ll find the issues Debian has all over the FOSS world (The Linux kernel is especially bad). And if you work in corporate IT like I do, you’ll soon notice that proprietary software organisations are no better. There’s software many people depend on maintained by a single overworked and struggling person everywhere you look. Yet it still works somehow. Cause wherever there is demand, a solution is found. And Debian at least has a long-established structure with the goal of finding that solution, even though it’s antiquated.
This is great news! Debian is back in contention for me.
Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs
I have no intention of using Arch (btw). I’m the kind of insufferable idealist who wants to use Debian for the high-minded principle of it. I consider Arch a toy distro for gamers. :)
I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.
That doesn’t mean the org always live up to it, but that’s partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.
The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I’m amazed they’re not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it’s a rock solid implementation.
There’s truth to what you’re hearing, all open source software is suffering.
Part of the allure of rolling releases for the places that have to maintain them is less maintaining! Debian does need maintainers.
Debian does ship old packages, that’s the point of “stable”, to be tested and known not to cause problems.
Free software is political. It’s literally not possible for there to have been more time spent discussing what to put on the website than looking for maintainers and updating packages, and part of stability isn’t active testing but instead time spent in active use.
Debian is on the same path it’s always been on, and reports of its imminent demise are exaggerated.
For me that would be Fedora (preferably KDE). I currently am on Aurora (Kinoite fork), but that’s because I value stability very highly (except for immutable and Debian nothing is stable enough).
Not OP, but can you sell me on Aurora? Every time I’ve tried any of the Fedora Immutable distros they just feel slow and awkward. I have a few tools that need rpm-ostree installs and fighting with flatpak permissions is the bane of my existence
If you had problems with fedora atomic aurora likely isn’t for you. Its main changes are adding stuff like codecs and drivers to the image and making distrobox more accessible. What tools do you use? Aurora-dx comes with brew preinstalled so maybe they are available there. Also using distrobox completely skips flatpak permissions so maybe that would help you
There are a few improvements in Aurora over Silverblue that you might like.
It ships with homebrew which is perfect for CLI tools.
It ships with distrobox instead of toolbx which is much better. You can install any distro while toolbx is just a Fedora. For example I’m using Arch in toolbox because of the number of packages and the fact that they’re usually up to date (no need to wait for a major release).
So far I never had to use rpm-ostree, and for VSCode I use distrobox precisely because of the permissions.
Well, let’s be real, pizza isn’t some kind of holy thing that is only Italian.
It’s not like they’re the only people to ever put things on flat dough and bake it.
But ignoring that, food is a living thing, just like most languages, like music, like fashion and art. You can try to stick a pin in it, but you kill the thing by doing so.
It reaches a point where it’s ludicrous to try and claim a thing is possessed in its entirety by the place that first named something.
Once a cultural idea spreads far enough, you can only specify one type of the thing. It’s why we have champagne, and sparkling wine. It’s a way of putting a pin in something but recognizing that there’s still living versions out there.
Or, look at it like the difference between formal and colloquial language.
Pizza may have started in Italy as a term, but it’s like kleenex and qtips. Pizza is now the generic term for stuff cooked on flat dough. It can even be applied to stuff being placed on flat bread, and then cooked, though I don’t know why you’d not call it one of the other words for that idea other than being unaware of those words.
Put whatever you want on your dough, call it pizza, and enjoy ;)
I’ve made a Christmas dinner pizza with a stuffing and gravy stuffed crust. Just have fun with the food you eat. Why be boring and keep things “authentic”?
She likes it, who cares? Enjoy what you want, and let others enjoy what they want. I don’t like tabasco on pizza but I’m not going to get bent out of shape over someone doing that. If you are trying to MAKE something and you want that something to be as authentic as possible then sure, tabasco shouldn’t be put on pizza. But you are eating. Eating is for enjoyment or sustenance . Not rules.
I tried ChromeOS today, and while it looks awesome, has some really great UI elements and integrations, I would still say uBlue with KDE Plasma comes close to it.
I would prefer sane atomic updates though, like twice a month. Fedora is not that good in that regard, you want to update every day as you get fixes every day.
Also, OCI images are consuming tons of bandwidth currently, so ostree is still better.
Honestly I’m in love with CachyOS (Arch derivative). Not only have they done a bunch of optimization work, but it’s quite stable (for Arch) and has a graphical way to do just about everything- including the install process
kbin.life
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