“What do you want from a desktop operating system? The real criteria are stability, package management, hardware compatibility, and the people behind the software, the community. For its superiority in those areas, I made Debian my workstation OS.” Read the article at NewsForge.
1, Of course, server downtime is likely to be more costly than a single desktop’s downtime. That, however, does not negate the cost of the desktop;s downtime. If you’re car broke down, would you be consoled if someone told you that your problem “cost less” than if a bus had broken down?
2. Whatever work someone does on his/her computer is up to that person, not anyone else. Writing, doing spreadhseets, researching, playing games, email, whatever. The “work” we do is whatever we decide it is. No one has the right to ridicule ot devalue that.
3. I know how to fix problems on the distributions I use. That’s besides the point. I’m tired of fixing problems. It isn’t enjoyable and it isn’t rewarding. I’ve got better things to do with my time. In my own experience, many professional geeks and techies have an arrogant and condescending attitude toward people — technically educated or not — who want their PC’s to work at a level of reliability comparable to their autos and their other appliances. Once initial setup and configuration is completed, spending time to fix bugs is wasted time.
4. I agree that Debian is not appropriate for “casual” home users. But, frankly, few distributions aimed at that market deliver up-to-date releases.If one wishes to use, for example, the current releases of OpenOffice, Mozilla, Firefox, etc., then your distributions may not deliver them.
I would like to thank the fellow Debian users that pointed out the existance of this great tool; had no idea until now that it existed! It certainly makes the task of searching for bugs reports pertaining to the packages I have installed much easier. There are lots of tools in the deb repositories that I feel deserve more recognition then what they usually get, and as mentioned, this is one of them. Maybe it could be submitted to Debian Package a Day’s if it hasn’t already been featured yet. I will search to see if it has.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
Its a shame it was written in ruby though.
@NemesisBLK
Its a shame it was written in ruby though.
Really, apt-listbugs written in Ruby? Well, that makes me love it even more… Ruby – the most elegant, effective and simple programming language there ever was
(Only Eiffel and PHP might compete with it in… Well, ok, Python might be rather allright too 
I enjoyed the article. Maintaining that it was submitted and was chosen for a contest of sorts (guised as an article or an essay), it was well-written and covered why the author enjoys using Debian GNU/Linux as his workstation distribution. While he did not cover in detail the popular setbacks of Debian GNU/Linux, in context of the contest-like selection process, that’s acceptable if not a bit lamentable. A good article (or editorial or essay) explains both positive and negative aspects regarding the subject.
As a long-time Debian user (eight years and counting), self-maintainer, and administrator, I’ve realized that the single most important (and useful) resource any software has is its community. Nearly all the currently popular Linux distributions (and BSD and so forth) have thriving user communities, be they on usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or irc networks (among others). It is somewhat disappointing that the article glossed over the user community (I don’t mean to neglect the developer community, but its relevance in my statements here are secondary), and I will attempt to note below two major traits I’ve seen (and sadly, perhaps helped propagate).
One: Debian’s userbase provides an extremely responsive (not always in a positive manner, unfortunately) resource. From its usenet newsgroups to mailing lists to irc channels (on virtually all the major irc networks), there are many thousands of people who share their experiences, who assist new users, who offer harsh criticism for bugs and related hitches, and who work together to make the Debian software approachable and efficient. I’ve “flamed” and been flamed my share of times in nearly all those avenues โ sometimes without consideration (for which I’ve apologized), sometimes within reason โ and the underlying presumption is that we’ve all read and heeded the relevant documentation, bug reports, and status updates. This approach requires a commitment that everyone inside and entering the community must embrace, which the article and previous responses have covered as Debian’s Social Contract at
http://www.debian.org/social_contract
which segues nicely into the second point.
Two: Debian’s userbase is extremely brittle. We tend to be a myopic, abusive, egoistical, overzealous, holier-than-thou bunch. That set of characteristics clashes directly with the fourth point of our beloved Social Contract. Some people might argue that because we are the users, we can be as brittle as we wish. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help improve our software: acting imperiously and condescendingly doesn’t gain us more eyes (apologies to those with special needs) to use and to assist in debugging our software. As a community, we need to “shape up” โ we need to realize that just because we do things “our” way does not imply “our” way is “the” way to do them. Just as there are the best softwares for any given contraints, there are softwares that aren’t suitable because of legacy, human factors, and so forth. What’s far more important is that we work together to improve the quality and selection of free software.
Aside from the above comments, however, I have no complaints regarding the article.
It’s trivial to get KDE3.3 installed on debian.One quick and dirty way is to edit your /etc/apt/sources.lst and add the unstable repository. After updating the source list a simple upgrade with synaptic is enough.
That is indeed what i tried (well. except that i used aptitude
), if you read the part you quoted yourself again, then i do specifically say that i tried to install the packages from SID ๐ It comes up with unresolveable package conflicts, and if i attempt to let it fix them, it wants to basically totally uninstall my system, which i didn’t feel like letting it do. So i have probably somehow managed to get a package installed that evaded being upgraded or replaced, and which now borks the system somewhat, and causes aptitude to want uninstall 80% of my packages to fix it
And since i am lazy, and it only prevents KDE from being installed, i am ignoring it for now and continue running a self compiled KDE.
@AdamW: nobody will ever convince me that urpmi and apt are just as good. In principle maybe. But in fact apt is a lot faster and more effective. I have tried them both.
@Daniel Chen: I couldn’t agree more with your evaluation of the Debian userbase, alas.
We like so much to split hairs and we can’t accept that our distro is not “easy” at all.
Now we have the new Sarge installer: great, installing the base system is easy now.
But that still doesn’t mean by far that a new user would know where to go from there: what to install, the configuration that follows, how to get plugins and commercial apps…
@AdamW: nobody will ever convince me that urpmi and apt are just as good. In principle maybe. But in fact apt is a lot faster and more effective. I have tried them both.
I have used both dpkg with apt-get as its front-end and urpmi.There isn’t a significant speed difference between the two.Hard to say which one is the most effective manager.I would say if they work it’s quite effective.
faster i’ll give you (though it’s not a *drastic* difference), urpmi’s written in perl and tends to creak a little now and again. I don’t care that much as I just start it up in a terminal and leave it to do its stuff in the background, when it’s done it’s done. More effective, nope – given the same repository they’d do the same job. If you have a specific point here (the area of ‘efficiency’) do let me know…
is written in C. Just for the record…
Debian GNU/Linux is really good distro but if only you use stable version.I mean no sarge or sid.it will take long time that Sarge will be stable.I don’t want to install twice in a week sid or sarge after upgrade,which really sucks!because usually after upgrade,system is unuseable.I know that they don’t recomend to use sid or sarge.but why should I use old version of almoust all programs while Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3.1 is out there?network installation takes about 2h then you have to configure which takes 1h if you’re not contented you default Debian kernel which doesn’t support alsa and bootsplash,then you have to compile your own kernel.I am relly hoping and waiting that sarge will be the stable
In 3 years I’ve reinstalled Debian once. And that was my mistake when I allowed a package maintainers updates to modify files automagically while I was away. It screwed up my authentication to X and after tracking down countless leads I reinstalled. All was well again.
Now I switched from Windows 2k/XP for all production usages.
XML/XSLT/XHTML Development, Java Development, Photoshop Development -> GIMP/Inkscape, Novel writing from Pagemaker to LaTeX, Cocoon 2 development from Windows to Debian and I’m way more productive today. PostgreSQL and mySQL work just fine on SID.
Now before Windows I was all NeXTSTEP/Openstep since I worked for NeXT and Apple. And since my job was a system support engineer I learned to study all the underpinnings of NeXTSTEP/Openstep. To a lesser degree possible I did with Windows 2k/XP. With Debian and all Linux distributions I can be as close to the code as I want like I did at NeXT. That to me has nothing but advantages.
My next systems will be equally split between Debian Linux and OS X.
If you don’t have much of a systems engineering background I can see where Debian may bother you but then again there is all sorts of documentation, just not in a cohesive and highly maintained fashion–volunteers are always welcome.
I run KDE 3.3.1 almost exclusively on SID. I’ve got GNOME 2.8 installed as well as Windowmaker for GNUstep development with Objective-C. I use the apps that best leverage my work needs. Some from GNOME and some from KDE and slowly more from GNUstep. Since the OS is so stable I’ll get an application like KILE 1.7.1 to crash when I’m working on say 20 views open but upon restart takes off where I left off.
Debian SID is solid, very solid. To denounce it without specifics speaks little of your analysis.
In fact, one can equate Debian SID against Mandrake, Knoppix, Slackware and others because they all carry the latest software releases. If there are flaws in a Debian build most often there will be flaws in the source code that will affect all distributions it is compiled under.
If anything, Debian Stable takes too long to reach maturity. Perhaps they need to branch two versions. One for Server and one for Workstation, but I doubt that will happen.
1. Debconf. I think the unix/linux way is you can edit manually config files and you are the boss. Not in Debian:
### BEGIN DEBCONF SECTION
# XF86Config-4 (XFree86 server configuration file) generated by dexconf, the
# Debian X Configuration tool, using values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the XF86Config-4 manual page.
# (Type “man XF86Config-4” at the shell prompt.)
#
# If you want your changes to this file preserved by dexconf, only make changes
# before the “### BEGIN DEBCONF SECTION” line above, and/or after the
# “### END DEBCONF SECTION” line below.
#
# To change things within the debconf section, run the command:
# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
(…)
The same with grub (menu.lst) where debconf knows better the order of my starting menu.
2. Woody is too old, Sid too new. Sarge could be OK. But it is the only one without security upgrades!
“2. Woody is too old, Sid too new. Sarge could be OK. But it is the only one without security upgrades!”
Testing normally doesn’t get official security updates. It gets new packages from Unstable which take some time to get properly tested and accepted. That’s why its rather slow on security updates though it does get them.
Since Sarge is nearing release, it does get security updates. Here, have a look at http://www.debian.org/security/nonvulns-sarge and deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-free
btw, when was the last time you used urpmi? there was substantial speed work done on it prior to 10.0 and between 10.0 and 10.1, it’s a lot snappier than it used to be.