Debian 8.0 Jessie Is Ready For Release This Weekend

[Kano]

I can not say that mesa 10.4 would be so much faster than 10.3 with my cards (mainly intel onboard, r600g). The older kernel 3.16 is a bit slow for Broadwell, easy to replace. Problematic is that Nvidia 340 is the newest driver in the repository. It does NOT support Maxwell gen 2. Basically i mirrored 343 from experimental in an extra repository to make it simple to install, but you can expect that 340 will be a legacy package soon. So it will break on future updates for all DX 10 Nvidia cards. Ubuntu already made that switch, but Debian was in freeze state already when this happend in Ubuntu. You can not use the Xserver in Jessie with the Nvidia drivers in the Debian repositories directly for Optimus switching but it seems that only Kanotix users test that ;-)

[chrisb]

*He* is ready for jessie, to build the CD images... but the rest of the distro doesn't look ready to me:
https://udd.debian.org/bugs/?release...gs=&sorto=desc

1,500+ release-critical bugs... one problem is that release-critical bugs discovered after release are never fixed.

Even when it is released, the transition to systemd as init, dracut for initramfs, and supporting stuff for desktop environments makes it a *really rough* upgrade. I'd advise anyone happy with their wheezy installation to not upgrade it at all, but consider jessie only for new installations.

3 out of 3 of my wheezy systems were unbootable after upgrading them this past week. I managed to get one booting again with systemd, after some painful diagnosis of some udev-related issue. On the others I had to manually repair initramfs to be able to access LUKS encrypted root, then restore original sysvinit-core to get them booting properly again; and still some basic functionality no longer works, like the shutdown/reboot buttons in the login manager and XFCE.

Yes, the systemd transition is a tough one. One of my systems also became unbootable, it would hang forever (something like "bringing up network... (0/nolimit)". There are still serious bugs with network manager that haven't been resolved, GPU driver hangs and crashes etc. It's interesting to see what bugs the developers consider release-critical or not ("Your system hangs every day? Mine doesn't - not release-critical.")

Graphic drivers bugs should not stop Debian release

The criteria for considering a bug release-critical in Debian is largely arbitrary: whether or not the bug "in the package maintainer's or release manager's opinion, makes the package unsuitable for release.". It's just an opinion. That's why people disagree; a user might (quite rightly) think that a regular crash of their desktop is unacceptable, while the developer might think that it is acceptable..

Consider these bug lists: Jessie graphics crashes and Jessie graphics hangs

Typical recent bugs:

• mesa crash starting XBMC
• X server crash when switching to another user
• glxinfo crash the system
• mesa crash on Libreoffice
• system crash with radeonsi
• system crash with 3D on external monitor

Is this really acceptable for a desktop release? That users can't switch user, run XBMC, glxinfo or libreoffice, or play a game on an external monitor, without crashing? I wouldn't mind so much if Debian was just a server distribution, or if the desktop releases came with a big warning "This desktop release has known crash bugs and will crash under some common usage scenarios", but it isn't and it doesn't. The desktop releases are presented as stable and reliable.

[Kano]

You can install fglrx instead if radeonsi, but i can not test radeonsi on my own, most likely just a kernel not mesa issue, kernel can be exchanged very easy.

[prv49692]

Been using Jessie for a few months and I agree, there are some nasty bugs - I had one with Iceweasel. However, I've switched from OS X and expected that. You just find workarounds to your problems and sometimes you end up with a better solution than what you had at first. If you can't play games on an external monitor with Debian (who installs Debian to do this?), try Ubuntu (or better yet, quit playing altogether).

[moilami]

You could try installing the mesa drivers from sid/unstable. They've got version 10.4.2 in there.

I use a jessie system for my own home PC, and selectively pick packages from testing and experimental to install. That way, I can get the latest and greatest, while running on a stable base.

I am writing this from fresh 15.04 install. This is all too painful. During the first login a system error screen appeared, of which I am all too familiar in Ubuntu. After that when installing steam I got an error message

zzz@ubublebee:~$ steam
Running Steam on ubuntu 15.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0_client)
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: r600
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

^C

Application searches show some advertisement crap, I dislike Unity and Ubuntu Software Center, which used to ask me to create some freaking account so that I could install software.

So yeah, I tested it, I disliked it big time, and now I need to pray hard for official Jessie to be released, so that I can get this thing away from my machine.

Sorry, Ubuntu folks, and no offence, just not my cup of coffee, even though most of the offending things can be fixed.

Thanks Deek for mentioning Sid repos, might have to try pull Mesa and stuff from there.

[moilami]

I am writing this from fresh 15.04 install. This is all too painful. During the first login a system error screen appeared, of which I am all too familiar in Ubuntu. After that when installing steam I got an error message

zzz@ubublebee:~$ steam
Running Steam on ubuntu 15.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0_client)
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: r600
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

^C

Application searches show some advertisement crap, I dislike Unity and Ubuntu Software Center, which used to ask me to create some freaking account so that I could install software.

So yeah, I tested it, I disliked it big time, and now I need to pray hard for official Jessie to be released, so that I can get this thing away from my machine.

Sorry, Ubuntu folks, and no offence, just not my cup of coffee, even though most of the offending things can be fixed.

Thanks Deek for mentioning Sid repos, might have to try pull Mesa and stuff from there.

Mouse pointer just disappears, and I have to look for it around the screen. I can usually find it from top left corner, and when I try to move it somewhere it just disappears. WTF? Is this real? I say NEVER again, I am done with Ubuntu for sure No offence

[chrisb]

zzz@ubublebee:~$ steam
Running Steam on ubuntu 15.04 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0_client)
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: r600
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

Steam bug #3801, same thing happens in Arch, see arch wiki for solution.

Ubuntu Software Center, which used to ask me to create some freaking account so that I could install software.

You don't need to create an account just to install software. You do if you want to *buy* software, just like every other commercial "app store", you need an account to track what you've bought...

Mouse pointer just disappears, and I have to look for it around the screen. I can usually find it from top left corner, and when I try to move it somewhere it just disappears. WTF? Is this real? I say NEVER again, I am done with Ubuntu for sure No offence

Since you dislike Unity, you could have installed Ubuntu Gnome, Kubuntu etc. instead?

[tuxd3v]

From my experience up to now, Debian is more stable than Ubuntu, and there are situations where one just wants to run a Desktop (with 3D acceleration), but doesn't care much about graphics performance.

The crashes aren't an issue for a server, where one can simply stop/uninstall X11, but on a desktop they are a no-go. Annoying is, that there would be a simple workaround. All the maintainer of the mesa package would have to do, would be to build it with the patch that disables asynchronous DMA...

Man...the crashes are everywhere...

for instance, try to install a centos guest server in a kvm hyper-visor...you will see the pain cutting you bones...

Debian is going in reverse mode, for some time now, and they start to go high speed...hang on..

[moilami]

Steam bug #3801, same thing happens in Arch, see arch wiki for solution.



You don't need to create an account just to install software. You do if you want to *buy* software, just like every other commercial "app store", you need an account to track what you've bought...



Since you dislike Unity, you could have installed Ubuntu Gnome, Kubuntu etc. instead?

Fair enough.

I was a bit harsh, there has been a lot of work put into Ubuntus, and there are some good features like PPAs, but I made the ultimate fix by installing Debian 8 Jessie The summer is coming, which means games should be put into a closet anyway, besides Wesnoth which has appeared into Jessie backports with version 1.12.2