Debian LTS Off To A Slow Start But Progressing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian LTS Off To A Slow Start But Progressing

Earlier this year was the announcement of Debian to be handled with Long Term Support for the Squeeze, Wheezy, and Jessie releases. That LTS support is working but their initial funding is coming up less than desirable and there's still open issues...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc4NTE

[curaga]

Hm, if I made 85 eur/h, I'd be able to retire after a year. Clearly I need to move to Norway and work for Debian.

[chrisb]

Debian LTS does not provide kernel updates, which is a shame since one of the most useful things about Ubuntu LTS is that you can still run a 2012 release on modern hardware. Debian 6 doesn't even support Intel CPUs from 2012 onwards (Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell), instead people are expected to use experimental packages, which is a bit hard when the iso installer doesn't even boot up on Intel graphics. (eg. bug #714203, bug #720898 etc.)

[Sonadow]

Debian LTS does not provide kernel updates, which is a shame since one of the most useful things about Ubuntu LTS is that you can still run a 2012 release on modern hardware. Debian 6 doesn't even support Intel CPUs from 2012 onwards (Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell), instead people are expected to use experimental packages, which is a bit hard when the iso installer doesn't even boot up on Intel graphics. (eg. bug #714203, bug #720898 etc.)

Roll your own kernel. It's easy enough these days.

the biggest concerns are X and Mesa.These are by far the hardest parts of the equation, since X is a complex beast and newer Mesa requires up-to-date X, LLVM and (if i recall) glibc.

TO date, X, Mesa, glibc and libstdc++ are the few things that I still dare not frankenstein on my installations.

[saulo]

with 85 eur/h they can move to India/China/Brazil and hire much more developers...

[chrisb]

Roll your own kernel. It's easy enough these days.

the biggest concerns are X and Mesa.These are by far the hardest parts of the equation, since X is a complex beast and newer Mesa requires up-to-date X, LLVM and (if i recall) glibc.

TO date, X, Mesa, glibc and libstdc++ are the few things that I still dare not frankenstein on my installations.

Of course you can compile your own kernel, and then Xorg and the appropriate Xorg drivers, and then build your own iso installer image with that kernel, etc. But this is beyond the technical abilities and motivation of most people. And it is not what most people understand by "Long Term Support". Could you imagine the outcry if, after Microsoft released Windows XP back in 2001, they then told people that to install on computers from 2002 onwards they had to compile their own kernels, display drivers and installer CDs? It's just not realistic.

[dungeon]

Of course you can compile your own kernel, and then Xorg and the appropriate Xorg drivers, and then build your own iso installer image with that kernel, etc. But this is beyond the technical abilities and motivation of most people. And it is not what most people understand by "Long Term Support". Could you imagine the outcry if, after Microsoft released Windows XP back in 2001, they then told people that to install on computers from 2002 onwards they had to compile their own kernels, display drivers and installer CDs? It's just not realistic.

Maybe you are not aware of, but Debian Testing is available earlier then year 2001. You can do your roll there all the time without compiling anything nor even waiting for Stable release .

Do not ask how Testing is stable, because it isn't Stable It can be stablier then Unstable, but i am not always sure - there is a gap in between

[chrisb]

Maybe you are not aware of, but Debian Testing is available earlier then year 2001. You can do your roll there all the time without compiling anything nor even waiting for Stable release .

Do not ask how Testing is stable, because it isn't Stable It can be stablier then Unstable, but i am not always sure - there is a gap in between

Debian Testing is described - by Debian - as:

Debian testing is the current development state of the next stable Debian distribution.

An example of the kinds of temporary breakage that may happen in next-stable testing was the upgrade from perl-5.6.0 to perl-5.6.1 which made perl unable to find its modules if they were from a package built with perl-5.6.0.

Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern.

If you want to have a secure (and stable) server you are strongly encouraged to stay with stable.

And you think that this is appropriate for businesses and others who want a reliable, dependable, distribution?

"Hey Boss, I want to run your business on Debian Testing"

"What's that? Testing?"

"Well, it's a in-development pre-release of a Linux distribution that by design sometimes has serious breakage which requires manual intervention to fix, and and by the way, the people who make it recommend not to use it if you care about security. But the stable release won't work on our new hardware and this one might!*"

(* it won't because Debian Testing is still on old Intel Xorg drivers which are buggy even on Ivy Bridge...)

[dungeon]

And you think that this is appropriate for businesses and others who want a reliable, dependable, distribution?

Yeah, it is reliable, dependable, but also easy to make derivate of it .

[doom_Oo7]

Roll your own kernel. It's easy enough these days.

the biggest concerns are X and Mesa.These are by far the hardest parts of the equation, since X is a complex beast and newer Mesa requires up-to-date X, LLVM and (if i recall) glibc.

TO date, X, Mesa, glibc and libstdc++ are the few things that I still dare not frankenstein on my installations.

Mesa is not a pain to build if you follow the official guide, however I find it to be recent enough on debian jessie (10.2.6-1) so that it does not require a rebuild...