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?

[birdie]

It's not too hard, you can pull a newer kernel from backports. It's true, you have to know what you're doing, but nobody claims that Debian is a distro for newcomers. You could say the same for Arch, or Gentoo.

The Problem of Debian is well presented in this comment section. People (that don't really use it) blame it for old software (which isn't fair since there is Testing/Sid with fancy new software), and rage about a single BLM point from a 40min presentation. Those people don't get that Debian isn't just a distro build by a couple of people (e. g. Arch) or a company (e. g. Red Hat), but rather by a community with roughly 1000 developers and >2000 additional uploaders (probably more), which are all bound by the same _social_ contract (yes that is a real thing in Debian).

Mixing packages from testing/unstable and Debian stable? What could go wrong? And how easy can it be achieved? And what about installing Debian on your new shiny laptop/PC when it comes with an ancient kernel out of the box? How would you proceed to boot with a new kernel right away, huh? Maybe people should also learn to rebuild installation media? Yeah, I last used Debian in 2001. I quickly understood back then that it was a distro for servers. Nothing has really changed for the past two decades.

[Danielsan]

I have been Debian Testing + Pinning toward Sid forever the only point is during the freezing time, by the way Debian can do a lot thing to improve like:

1. Improving the release cycles like: rolling + snapshots + lts snapshots, just for instance.
2. Improving the package creation so people would be more involved in working upstream directly on Debian.
3. Better bug reporting and better attitude toward who report the bug.
4. Being init agnostic again or working together with other derivatives like Devuan.
5. Focus on general availability over all the platform, innovation and best practices.
6. Being again independent.

[skeevy420]

Release cycle is a toughie. There's always going to be some lag. If Debian released packages willy-nilly that'd be chaos. So some kind of a happy medium needs to be struck. Debian's reputation is that it is a bit behind, but solid. Which I am OK with. My priorities line up well with that. I'm on the platform because it is solid. If I didn't care about that there's plenty of other paths I could choose.

Can't say that I disagree with release cycles being tough. All you have to do is look at random releases from the past to see examples of crappy package choices because some project's stable release came 3 days after a version freeze or the distribution release was held up a bit to accommodate a new package release. That's why I'm against release cycles and prefer rolling release distributions. But I'm also thing from the point of view of a home user. I'd have a completely different point of view for a scenario where I'd be managing multiple systems.

The problem with Debian is that it isn't 2005 anymore. The world moves faster than their release cycles and guidelines can keep up with, at least in my experiences as a desktop/GUI user. Even CentOS, which IMHO is their biggest competitor since both aim for servers and stability, has a rolling release edition these days. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, Debian Testing just isn't adequate to use as a long term rolling release OS like Arch, Gentoo, Manjaro, or Tumbleweed are.

[danmcgrew]

"The Problems Debian Is Facing In 2020" are all contained in the simple statement and fact that none of the problems Debian is facing in 2020--dealing with the production of a world-class Linux distribution--are addressed by this talk and slide show.

ALL of the problems Debian is facing in 2020 are created by Debian, and ARE contained within this presentation.

[DRanged]

There's a lot wrong with the presentation....

• Most of the problems I encounter is because of an arbitrary definition of stability. The stable branch is basically just old, and although it is unlikely to fail, it doesn't offer everything people are looking for. So, you could jump to testing, but even that has relatively outdated packages, and is very unstable. Arch offers newer packages with (to my understanding) fewer paid developers, and I encounter far fewer problems due to updates.

I would disagree with very unstable. Depending on used case it has Debian testing has been rock solid for me in the last 9 years. See previous posts of me.

[mos87]

regarding the last slide... here's a list of some REALLY WONDERFUL twitter accounts to follow (for YOUR GREAT AMUSEMENT):

https://twitter.com/realShamima

https://twitter.com/Zara_Bukake_MP

https://twitter.com/X_R_Brum

https://twitter.com/Layla_MoronMP

[DRanged]

Debian should do something about there bug reports, because when I lookup a bug report I do stumble on reports from more than a decade ago while there are new versions out and defintely not showing anymore the behaviour when it was reported and not closed maybe due to laziness, incompetence or whatever.

[DRanged]

Debian testing is not for everybody and it breaks at times (been there done that). The average Joe doesn't want something like that. They would much prefer a stable distro, which works on modern computer.

Not sure what you mean with "Debian Stable isn't intended for that use case.". It's supposed to run on computers, if it runs only on very out of date hardware due to missing modern drivers... I guess that's a complain I have about it and it's the very one which makes me exclude Debian for anything I do with Linux, no matter what.

Just as an example: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, which is old, very old by now, has more up to date drivers than Debian stable. It boots on modern computers because Red Hat backports the drivers to the older kernel RHEL runs. This requires a lot of man power of course. An alternative approach would be do like Fedora does: just run upstream kernel, staying one release behind to allow it to stabilize. I guess this is not for everybody, but works fairly well at the end of the day.

I would disagree Debian testing can also be used by average Joe and works fine on a modern computer, been running it for the last 9 years and as I mentioned in an earlier post only had 2 hiccups and don't forget Windows 10 breaks more often than Debian testing having AMD Ryzen 5 3600 desktop and a Lenovo Legion y520 notebook. Been there done that . Although to make it more accessable they need to make the installation easier if you are missing firmware. You have to search to much for the firmware cd/net-install. Debian stable is more geared for servers than the standard dektop.

[DRanged]

I could agree with the problems presented in Debian. Not catching up enough and not having easier on boarding also has technical consequences. I see Debian as still stuck in early 2000. The don't release often and they don't push updated packages to the current stable release. This is not good. You need recent drivers to run well on newer computers, in fact most Linux distros based on Debian don't ship the stock debian kernel, or mesa drivers (SteamOS anybody?).

There is nothing wrong with having a super high quality and rock solid distro, they should keep this goal as it's part of the Debian brand, but if it doesn't run on my laptop because your kernel it's old... all that mighty rock solid power is if little use.

I hope they can sort it out and improve their situation.

One of the reasons I run Debian testing on a desktop and Lenovo Legion y520, it might give the occasional hiccup happened only twice to me in 9 years, and being rock solid. For firefox and thunderbird I made my own script to install the latest stable versions and it automatically updates. Ditto for Adobe flashplayer, disabled but just in case, I have a need for it which becomes less and less.