The Problems Debian Is Facing In 2020

[creoflux]

The idea that people are rushing to Debian project to get their take on a issue not related to their software is a little bit odd. I somewhat cringe at the idea that they formulate positions on these things. The world is a lot larger than the US and ignoring any issue would open you to criticism.

Did they release a statement about wildfires in Australia? What about their position on Uyghurs in China? Women's rights in Saudi? Boko Haram? AfCFTA?

[pininety]

• Stability for Debian means "there might be bugs, but there won't be _new_ bugs".

It also means "it might not work at all but at least does that reliably". Especially troublesome if you have a package that depends on an external service that might get updated making the unupdated package unfunctional. Like the dyndns1 protocol deprecation.
It also means much more work for upstream because they are hit with a ton of support requests for very old software because many users just go directly to upstream to report instead of the horrible Debian issue tracker.

At some point, I just started switching everything over to Arch Linux, had less issues with that on multiple machines that just having debian on a signle router for 2 years. Arch just worked, the few times I had an issue after an update, I normally just had to wait for a few hours as the bug was always already reported and worked upon and the mirror servers just hadn't picked it up while any issue I had with debian was "Yeah, that was fixed upstream x years ago but we refuse to update, just run unstable!"
which kind of makes the hole point about Debian being so stable mood.

[waxhead]

As so many have pointed out already , stuff like BLM is completely irrelevant for Debian. What matters for Debian is to communicate technical excellence properly. If the distro's desktop and/or website is pretty enough is utterly nonsense and completely the wrong focus. It is compact and functional - no need to change that.

IMHO Debian would benefit most if the testing repo was either renamed to rolling or if there was a new repo in addition to stable, for example something like "rolling" or "prestable" or "nextstable" where testing packages are migrated just like packages migrate to testing now. If for nothing else, a new name would help people understand that testing is a lot more stable than what "testing" may seem.

Also a repo where you could pull slightly experimental debian kernels e.g. a mix between testing and latest vanilla kernel would be useful. Documentation would also be more useful if they could group oldstable information somewhere special. The bugreport tool could also be improved it it kept track of what bugs you actually reported so you could revisit them easily.

Luckily there will be a new project leader in a little while

[DMJC]

TBH I don't really feel like Debian needs improving at all. It works and is quite reliable. If anything I just want packages to move through the release pipeline faster. Politics is easy to ignore, it's not like the distro is ramming politics down your throat at install time. Most of the technical
issues are with upstream not Debian.

[ed31337]

How did it go on the pi4? Thinking of getting one to stick in an old thinkpad shell.

I tore open one of those to do the same, but my LCD was too old and low res to make it worth while. Plus, there is no easy way to interface the laptop's keyboard to the RPi as far as I know. In the end, I just have a heap of old laptop innards laying around that I probably ought to just throw away...

What turned out to be better, in my opinion, was getting an old HDMI TV and mounting the RPi4 to the back of that. A TV works better than a computer LCD because the TV will give you a free digital audio output over HDMI, whereas a computer LCD usually lacks audio entirely.

I screwed two wooden sticks to the back of my TV using the VESA mounting screw holes. Then I screwed down some heavy gauge copper wires bent as hooks to hold my Raspberry Pi 4 very solidly between the two wooden sticks. This gives penty of room for airflow and easy access to the Raspberry Pi's plethora of connectors. I even managed to shape the wood to let me press fit a USB hard drive and an old power supply fan. From the front, you can't even tell anything DIY is going on back there.

Sure, it's perhaps not as portable and sleek as a laptop. But it is far more accessible for future tinkering with the GPIO pins, etc.

[tuxd3v]

The idea that people are rushing to Debian project to get their take on a issue not related to their software is a little bit odd. I somewhat cringe at the idea that they formulate positions on these things. The world is a lot larger than the US and ignoring any issue would open you to criticism.

Did they release a statement about wildfires in Australia? What about their position on Uyghurs in China? Women's rights in Saudi? Boko Haram? AfCFTA?

Of-course..
Only a person so disassociated from reality could ask Debian to issue a statement about some factor other than Software..
For what it seems this people exists,
And when they are Leading a Social Software project, that could indeed explain why that project is not so well after all..you don't need to look further..

About the claim of Debian using old kernels.. Debian should use the best option, and frankly speaking, recent kernels are a mess, so I do recognize that Debian think in a more conservative way in that regard, you shouldn't just get newer kernels just because ..they are just newer..

On the other side, there are plenty of new features coming in recent kernels, but you have the testing repo for that, of even sid..

[Jormungandr]

I'm not sure it's possible to say that GNU/Linux is completely apolitical--the concept of free/libre/open-source software is inherently political in many countries where copyright legislation comes from the government. Though, yes, focusing on an amero-centric political stance doesn't fit the overall goal of worldwide inclusivity.

To the broader point and many of the comments here, it's hard to tell what the focus is. Is the goal to attract new users to Debian or to satisfy their existing base? With the array of distros, and my desire to run new code, my personal machine is Arch. With a distro like Debian, it seems like you'd have to pick one or the other and do it well--their persona is where it was 15-20 years ago when I started tinkering with Linux.

At one point before git was ubiquitous and I had dialup, I needed reliable packages on the installation media. Nowadays the upstream/downstream repackaging method just means I'm running old code with minimal recourse outside of backporting (which seems like far more effort and prone to issues)

[mdedetrich]

I think Debian does an amazing job in delivering a free OS and pushing good programming practices (instead of just blindly taking what's out there).

This has massively backfired because in a lot of cases Debian has incorrectly backported patches for programming environments (i.e. VM's) causing bugs specific to their system. i.e. with JVM (java virtual machine) debian created bugs in their LTS release of JVM because they incorrectly applied patches and iirc this was also pushed up to ubuntu since debian uses ubuntu.

Its not possible to know the best practices for every programming language/project out there.

[heredoc]

[...]What if I don't want my email address to be displayed publicly (what about privacy)?[...]

For that reason I always use launchpad to report bugs against debian packages.
As a long time user I never got used to use e-mails for bug-reports and ditched reportbug all along.

I'd really like some kind of gitlab, where i could fix typos for me recent bug-reports or edit comments i made for extra info.
I think Debian is missing 75% of its users bug-solving power.

[Volta]

I'm really enjoying drinking all these tears. Anybody else? There's nothing else to argue, because not a single one of you can get it through your thick skulls. The battle is over, and all you do nothings lost.

Your skull is the thickest one BLM no brainer. It's a shame for Debian to have such moron as a leader.