The Problems Debian Is Facing In 2020

[Melcar]

Is there an alt-right distro out 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.

[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.

[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.

[grok]

That third slide IS a problem..

"We still lack diversity .." - of thought, yes.
"Large regions are underrepresented in the project" - so what? They are all free to join. Maybe some "large regions" are not interested in Debian, just maybe.
"We failed to put together a timely message regarding black lives matter" - GOOD! This is a political issue and has NOTHING to do with Debian.

Diversity hiring violates the declaration of human rights and preamble of the constitution in my country, how about that?
You need to compile a list of countries in this situation and ignore/disregard "diversity" statistics for them in your analysis.

Requiring staff, maintainers to violate the constitution isn't very "inclusive".
Also, spreading BLM outside the US is incitement to racial riots and hence, unwarranted. People might get beaten to death by brainwashed mobs. Also, the ideology is based on falsehoods among other issues.

[schmidtbag]

Stability for Debian means "there might be bugs, but there won't be _new_ bugs". Ofc that's not for everyone, but it also doesn't need to be for everyone. Imagine an office computer. It doesn't need new software, the important thing is that there won't be any new bugs or changing UIs. Also, Testing is pretty stable, and it's not old. I don't know where you get that from, you can check the numbers on repology.org. Arch is basically as stable as Testing. If there is a bug from upstream, you'll get it on both. Package breakages usually only appear on Sid and it's easy to resolve them (speaking from experience).

Fair point about the stable branch, though, I'm not sure if that's actually a more desirable outcome if said bugs are known to have fixes in a newer release.
As for testing, I said relatively outdated packages. Like I said, Arch has newer packages, and yet it's more stable. I've had a lot of critical breakages over the years due to Debian testing updates. It gets pretty annoying. I can go 5+ years with the same Arch setup and nothing fails.

Debian isn't just a distro, it's (huge) community. You can't compare that to a project with like 20 people. Debian has a so called " Social Contract", which makes it rather different from most FOSS projects. Also, stop crying about that BLM point, it was literally a minute of 40 minutes from the presentation.

It's huge community is all the more reason why its breakages are unacceptable, when a small community doesn't encounter the same problems.
Also, I'm not "crying" about anything, jackass. I'm saying that the Debian project isn't relevant to such politics, where bringing it up (whether you're for or against it) accomplishes nothing good. Prove me wrong.
If members of the community say "I'm a Debian user and I support BLM!" they're free to do so and I see nothing wrong with that. If Debian as a whole starts talking about it, that is a problem.

Just being international doesn't make you diverse. Even if everyone could join but only a specific group of people does, it means you are not diverse. Whether that's Debian's fault or just because only a specific group of people is interested in working on a distro are two separate points, but - for example - getting more women into the FOSS world is a nice goal IMHO.

Mind explaining how, in your words, a "(huge) community" is supposed to have the same kind of people in every single country it is involved in? It's practically impossible to not have people of different races, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds when you have so many people from so many different places. Sure, you're probably going to have a lot of Germans in their Germany branch, but why exactly is that a problem?
Diversity is a wonderful thing and any bigot who doesn't want a certain kind of person in their presence can go to hell, but forcing diversity for the sake of just having diversity is unproductive. Debian does in fact have diversity. This is a non-issue for them. There are a lot of white neckbeards but that isn't the only thing the community is comprised of.

[L_A_G]

I can understand that being concerned over a lack of participation from regions with a lot of potential and very good contributors might be a problem, this is why I'm so annoyed by programs like Gnome's "outreachy" and their downright comical amero-centricism when it comes to diversity, but needing to come out in support of a movement as divisive Black Lives Matter?

Now don't get me wrong, I'd be equally dismayed if they came out in support of Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys or other BLM equivalents on the other end of the spectrum. However this all sounds like massive mission creep distracting from the actual issues that a project like Debian is set up to solve. Race politics is outside of the purview of a technical project as much as standards on food refrigeration or drug safety is outside of the purview of the Federal Aviation Administration (the american airline safety authority).

I don't mind diversity programs per-say. I'd be totally fine with outreachy if it was totally turned on it's head and focused on finding diverse talent in parts of the world open source communities often don't go looking for talent from (Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia, etc.). However the current amero-centric view on it trying to find talent in a pool that's already heavily sought after by companies with much deeper pockets is unlikely to gain any tangible results. Not in terms of finding talent that wouldn't have been found anyway (we're talking people in one of the most developed countries on the planet), not in terms of what the new hires could offer (race does not correlate with unique skills in the slightest and the only diversity proven to produce results is a diversity in skill sets) and most certainly not in terms of the actual results produced (outreachy results have so far been downright pathetic compared to the resources expended).

[grok]

Debian 6 had decent enough "design", "branding", "graphics". Then Gnome 3 and GTK3 happened. So the default desktop took quite a back seat.
I might suggest to have a download link on the left for Debian Gnome 3 : the distro for the corporate desk, 3D printer users, coders on high end laptops, Wayland nerds etc. and a link on the right for Debian Mate : normal desktop for traditional users, unaccelerated users, your grandma and Windows refugees.

[starshipeleven]

Okay, this is actually Debian policy.

He isn't talking about using old versions, he talks about maintainers only doing (some) major version updates to the package and then going back to sleep

[grok]

Now don't get me wrong, I'd be equally dismayed if they came out in support of Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys or other BLM equivalents on the other end of the spectrum. However this all sounds like massive mission creep distracting from the actual issues that a project like Debian is set up to solve. Race politics is outside of the purview of a technical project as much as standards on food refrigeration or drug safety is outside of the purview of the Federal Aviation Administration (the american airline safety authority).

Airplane food and pilots using some kind of amphetamines are important , unlike other topics.