The Sad State Of Web Browser Support Currently Within Debian

[Anvil]

It makes zero sense to blame the package format.

it makes perfect sense to blame .deb, its Crapola,

[avem]

I never said an outdated version was less risky. I've always run direct from Mozilla on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I was asking if there was a risk to bypassing 'packaged by Debian' because for whatever reason, people in the thread felt they were locked into what ever shipped with, or was available within the repo for, Debian.

Risky because Debian doesn't offer it? Are you saying Linux users must be confined to what their distro offers and never run anything beyond that? That's ... sad and restrictive to put it mildly.

[AmericanLocomotive]

This kind of nonsense is why Linux perpetually struggles to gain ground. The "just fork it!" mentality prevalent in the Linux world has resulted in dozens of different OS projects all doing different implementations of the same thing. The amount of wasted "duplicated work" in the Linux community is mind boggling.

The different package types, package managers, the constant dependency-hell. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. If I want to use Firefox on Windows, I go to "getfirefox.com", download it, and then install it. It's done, it works, and it will auto-update itself for the next 10 years without fail.

If I want the latest Firefox on debian, I apparently have to manually download it from Mozilla's site, dick around in the terminal, rebuild half of my OS (including the graphics stack), cross my fingers and hope it works. Then do the exact same thing again when the next version gets released in 2 months????

Needing to rely on Some guy in Nebraska to keep every build of popular software on the distro's package manager up-to-date is just such a colossal failure. It's a complete and utter maintenance nightmare.

The Linux community needs to figure this out. I have my fingers crossed that the Steamdeck will be a big enough success to at least push the community into some kind of sensible direction. Doubt it though.

[mppix]

This kind of nonsense is why Linux perpetually struggles to gain ground. The "just fork it!" mentality prevalent in the Linux world has resulted in dozens of different OS projects all doing different implementations of the same thing. The amount of wasted "duplicated work" in the Linux community is mind boggling.

The different package types, package managers, the constant dependency-hell. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. If I want to use Firefox on Windows, I go to "getfirefox.com", download it, and then install it. It's done, it works, and it will auto-update itself for the next 10 years without fail.

If I want the latest Firefox on debian, I apparently have to manually download it from Mozilla's site, dick around in the terminal, rebuild half of my OS (including the graphics stack), cross my fingers and hope it works. Then do the exact same thing again when the next version gets released in 2 months????

Needing to rely on Some guy in Nebraska to keep every build of popular software on the distro's package manager up-to-date is just such a colossal failure. It's a complete and utter maintenance nightmare.

The Linux community needs to figure this out. I have my fingers crossed that the Steamdeck will be a big enough success to at least push the community into some kind of sensible direction. Doubt it though.

Of course this is solved.
Just run flatpak (with your fav browser), relax and grap some popcorn while everybody else on phoronix seems to loose their mind over a package issue in debian stable (who even runs Debian stable on a desktop?)

[EndOfFile]

Risky because Debian doesn't offer it? Are you saying Linux users must be confined to what their distro offers and never run anything beyond that? That's ... sad and restrictive to put it mildly.

You're a special little penguin, aren't you?

[mdedetrich]

Of course this is solved.
Just run flatpak (with your fav browser), relax and grap some popcorn while everybody else on phoronix seems to loose their mind over a package issue in debian stable (who even runs Debian stable on a desktop?)

Well it's not just desktop, debian is even having issues with servers with its model, for example of you want IO_uring for your server you are out of luck.

Flatpak has the same issue in certain circumstances, i.e. if you want to game you likely want the latest graphics stack which means having an up to date/latest kernel.

That's the other point, the kernel lately on terms of features is also moving a lot faster than it did in the past.

[wswartzendruber]

Of course this is solved.
Just run flatpak (with your fav browser), relax and grap some popcorn while everybody else on phoronix seems to loose their mind over a package issue in debian stable (who even runs Debian stable on a desktop?)

As I said earlier, I run Debian Bullseye on my tower and my ThinkPad. I have Brave configured as an APT source and on both machines, everything works amazingly well, including hardware acceleration.

Other stuff I need to stay current on comes through Snap. The Brave snap didn't support hardware acceleration.

Desktop:
ASUS Prime X570-P
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
ASUS Radeon RX 5600 XT Dual EVO
Crucial Ballistix 3,200 MHz (128 GB)
Seagate FireCuda 520 (1 TB)

ThinkPad T495:
AMD Ryzen 5 3500U
24 GB RAM
Seagate Barracuda 510 (1 TB)

[Danielsan]

And again, you completely missed the point. If your distribution cannot handle different release cycles (or speed) that other upstream projects have then simply put your distribution needs work to solve this problem. The reason why debian gets laughed at so much is the entire point release process that they use is inflexible and outdated and this is the precise issues it causes. Complaining that "browsers are garbage" is a scapegoat, debian shouldn't even care or know its a browser.

Debian worked in the 90's when the world wasn't as interconnected as it is now and when security landscape was different, now its another story and browsers have to update continuously as new bugs/security issues are found constantly. Furthermore this model of backporting fixes makes it a complete and utter nightmare for upstream to properly diagnose issues due because now they have to deal with some custom patched browser.

And regarding downloading a safe browser, if you are that obsessive about it then use lynx/wget/curl to do so.

If you read the mailing list they are already at work to fix the problem, however the problem are garbage browsers, said that no one in Debian is paid for doing what they do, the pace won't be never optimal.

Let me clarify there is not any scapegoat: browsers and the corporation behind are the problem whatever they touch is doomed, personal opinion of course.

Debian still make sense and it is probably the only community project that is designed as operative system and consistent across the whole system, couldn't say the same for Arch; even though Debian uses a release model the concept of being rolling was probably introduced by Debian itself, you can use Debian in rolling mode since ever, although being rolling is a development step and not the scope.

To reply to your last sentence Debian is for all, not for me or for you; Ubuntu is a great project however is born to make Debian a commercial product, that's why has never overtaken Debian which is still there and it will probably survive to Ubuntu, hence despite all the security issues must be shipped with a browser and the only true still free (as in freedom) browser is Firefox.

And agree with your response to Danielsan

And you should not because he is wrong...

[Danielsan]

This kind of nonsense is why Linux perpetually struggles to gain ground. The "just fork it!" mentality prevalent in the Linux world has resulted in dozens of different OS projects all doing different implementations of the same thing. The amount of wasted "duplicated work" in the Linux community is mind boggling.

The different package types, package managers, the constant dependency-hell. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. If I want to use Firefox on Windows, I go to "getfirefox.com", download it, and then install it. It's done, it works, and it will auto-update itself for the next 10 years without fail.

If I translate it like: we should play only country music all the other musical genre are just fragmentation and waste of time, sounds very stupid.

If I want the latest Firefox on debian, I apparently have to manually download it from Mozilla's site, dick around in the terminal, rebuild half of my OS (including the graphics stack), cross my fingers and hope it works. Then do the exact same thing again when the next version gets released in 2 months????

Do you know how a Linux distro is made? What you are complaining for happens more or less with any distro. Mozilla might provide the appimage which would work even better than the windows installer.

Needing to rely on Some guy in Nebraska to keep every build of popular software on the distro's package manager up-to-date is just such a colossal failure. It's a complete and utter maintenance nightmare.

People invoked corporations into the free and opensource space and this is what is happened.

The Linux community needs to figure this out.

But they did the answer is systemd.

I have my fingers crossed that the Steamdeck will be a big enough success to at least push the community into some kind of sensible direction. Doubt it though.

Plasma + Archlinux...

[billyswong]

There isn't a one stop solution for everyone. It depends on what your deployment is for as to what'll best fit your needs.

If you deploy an ancient distrobution that can't keep pace with the ecosystem, the cost you pay for that is not being able to keep pace with security fixes. It might be an acceptable trade off if it's a single system running legacy software that's no longer developed and not connected to the internet.

The "Stability" Debian users think they are getting is mostly a figment of their overactive imaginations, is in reality a known and rarely changing attack surface.

The solution to the browser problem is don't use out of date legacy distros.

It's funny you quoted my word "Notice, differences due to distribution update / upgrade schedules and choices don't count. It has to be something due to the format itself" yet keep on speaking what you don't like about Debian Stable update schedule.

Come on, just admit you over-stretched when you blamed the package format .deb is the culprit. I am running the latest Firefox 95 provided by Linux Mint in the form of .deb repository. Linux Mint is not a huge team nor with tons of money. But they are at least capable to provide an up to date Firefox for both the Ubuntu-based variant and the Debian-based variant of Linux Mint.