The Problems Debian Is Facing In 2020

[ed31337]

I used to use Debian. First as a Ubuntu user, then as a Raspbian user. While the packages were really stable and the packaging system always worked perfectly, I no longer use Debian. Instead, I'm using Gentoo because everything is up-to-date, works almost as flawlessly, and everything is compiled with the best optimization settings for my device (64-bit ARM RPi4). On a speed limited device like my RPi4, every little bit of extra performance I can squeeze out of the system is a big improvement.

I do miss how fast and reliable sudo apt-get update && upgrade was though. Gentoo's Portage system is really slow and kind of clunky, due being written in Python. But for now, the end results justify the upfront pain.

[wswartzendruber]

What on God's green earth does BLM have to do with computer science? Somebody throw this ENFP (or whatever) out and put an INTJ in there.

[goTouch]

When it is hard to get things done (with a slow process), and the work list is long (with so many packages), refresh is slow and people will become simply less interested.

To attract people to work on it, good tooling, focus on the set of most important packages, and fresh looking every now and then is the must for Linux distro.

I hope Debian keeps rolling as the basis of many other distros, and with help from other distros.

[Melcar]

Is there an alt-right distro out there?

[direx]

What about a horrible bug tracker which is nothing more than a gloried mailing list?

I second that. I cannot think of a worse way to report bugs than the Debian way. Why do I need a configured MTA or mail application to report a bug? What if I want to report a bug from a diffent machine? What if I don't want my email address to be displayed publicly (what about privacy)?

What about stale/outdated packages (I know the policy but Debian has literally thousands of packages with minor updates missing)?

Okay, this is actually Debian policy. What really frustrates me though is when Debian patches break a package and nobody cares about it. Due to the horrible bug tracker it's also not easy to see if the issue is being worked on or not.

I don't care about eye-candy at all, but Debian should really improve the ways that users interact with the project itself. They need to leave the 90s behind and become more modern in so many places.

[starshipeleven]

I almost died reading the "problems" debian has as I was drinking tea and almost got chocked. Supporting a communist ideology is something with is good. All lives matter.

careful with such racist names with "white" in it, you don't want to provoke a reaction from sjws

[starshipeleven]

The Init-debate was the moment when Debian got definitely broken as project.

yeah, i'll add it to the list of bad things systemd caused.

[Paul Frederick]

At this point, it's a given that any sort of organization has to make a statement that they support Black Lives Matter, without anyone actually caring about whether or not anyone else lives or dies.

Debian should make the bold move and simply not pander to people. Debian has always been the wokest Linux distribution going. Talk about trained Marxists. Although Red Hat did grab the red moniker first. So Debian did miss that boat. Maybe it is high time Debian rebranded? I'd run Woke Linux. Maybe Woke could offer a special black edition too? Filter fortunes through jive or something. I think I actually did that once. I'm installing jive right now and getting ahead of the curve on this one. No one is going to out virtue signal me! All I need now is the off color fortune database too. This ought to be good.

[White Wolf]

I almost died reading the "problems" debian has as I was drinking tea and almost got chocked. Supporting a communist ideology is something with is good. All lives matter.

[Danielsan]

I have been using Debian for at least ten year as main desktop and I saw the catastrophic parabola of Debian:

First issue the lack of identity: Debian is basically an academic project and should involve primarily people from academic institutes from all over the world, this would assure fresh ideas and a stable stream of high skilled volunteers. Debian should not do marketing in the same way that Ubuntu does, the biggest point of Debian is the social contract, this is what should be promoted as the common ground toward a sustainable and inclusive community focused on free software (as in freedom) and Computer Science, what should be the Debian Project.

Second Issue the lack of lead: Debian has been cannibalized by Canonical, a lot of people assume that Debian is (or was) made for server, this wasn't true in the past and is not true today; if you look at the metric Ubuntu is the main Linux server out there now. The main corporations that are involved with Debian, Guugle and Canonical, want also lead its development and are constantly pressing the project behind the scenes. The project today just follows what other corporations decide. There is not reason for a project no-profit made by volunteers to follow what the corporations impose. The Init-debate was the moment when Debian got definitely broken as project.

The combination of both has been catastrophic, I don't care about being fancy, as a matter of fact Debian uses upstream software with a very minimum customization and I am fine with this, but we changed from "Ubuntu stands for I am not able to install Debian" to "Debian is the ugly and inferior version of Ubuntu"; Canonical has a big part in the collapsing of Debian: if from a side it contributes (or better incorporated) devs that are working on both projects by the other hand is constantly doing PR and Marketing against Debian. Debian can be hold but the Ubuntu LTS are even older and are kept buggy for all their cycle since Canonical only supports a reduced set of the Debian repository. For instance installing Debian today is really trivial and it supports all the graphic cards as much as Ubuntu does, but I still continues to read blogs everywhere that suggest Ubuntu against Debian for the easy of use, this is not true, it is just PR pushed by Canonical without considering that Debian, while can be used by anyone and should be used by all as very first distro since does not promote bad practice as Ubuntu does since ever, it is a distro that promotes an active learning hence doesn't make sense making it easier (although is actually easier to use) as the modern distros try to do.

If Debian will not address this two points will not able to recover from its current status.