Debian 10.0 "Buster" Now Available - Powered By Linux 4.19, GNOME + Wayland

[R41N3R]

> And what exactly makes software outdated?! You can't compare a program to milk that you need to throw away after a certain date.
I can and will make that comparison. Software is updated for a reason. [cont. after next quote...]

> you obviously value stability less than shiny
No, I value having up to date software that has fixes and better support -- of which won't reach Debian until some dumb neckbeard thinks that because something is over 6 months old it is now ""stable.""
Old != Stable -- they don't even test this shit, they just think that because it's old it must be good.

> Debian is not a toy - it's for getting real work done!
I mean, they're launching with 3/4ths of a year old kernel for Christ's sake, the latest MinGW on there uses GCC 6 FROM 2016!
I literally *cannot* work with this given my work entails a) graphics and b) something compiled with MinGW.

What do you define as ""real work""?

Exactly my biggest complaints too. It's all about making packaging complex so that maintainers feel important delivering old software. And yes, testing is not a solution, it is almost always frozen to old software too. And sid, does brake way too often. It was such a relive for me when I first tried Arch Linux, I couldn't believe how well all pieces work together and nowadays I trust it as well for my serves. Live is easy if you can fix issues for yourself or when using mesa-aco-git is just one command away :-)

[R41N3R]

I had my rodeo with Siduction and Sid. Worst year of Linux ever. Efff that.

Me too, it was such a bad experience.

[dungeon]

It doesn't ask anything, just fails on sudo apt-get update. So what's the way to work around it?

There are else people who get that and doing this seems to be solution:

 apt-get --allow-releaseinfo-change update

Not sure why this happens for some people, here it did asked me Yes or No but for some it seems just fail to ask it for some reason...

Hmm... i was using plain apt command there not apt-get, so could be that too... just a guess

[eydee]

Damn, Windows 95 is dead.

[JoshuaAshton]

Not sure what he's looking at. Buster's got the recent mingw 6.0.0.3 which uses GCC 8.3. And updating to a newer kernel is a pain-free experience. Whatever. Sounds like a lot of drama over nothing.

I was slightly mistaken on the MinGW front -- but 8.3 is still not a good compromise.
I have tried that release before on Sid and it produced completely broken binaries -- this could be avoided if things were just kept up to date. 🐸

[rastersoft]

if you enjoy outdated software and drivers that make nothing work, sure!

Use SID instead of Stable.

[Guest]

And what exactly makes software outdated?! You can't compare a program to milk that you need to throw away after a certain date. Debian buster is fairly up to date, and the testing repo is more than bleeding edge enough for most users anyway. If you can't wait a month or two (and in some cases less) to get the latest and greatest then you obviously value stability less than shiny. Debian is not a toy - it's for getting real work done!

Even installing Debian requires luck, as their installer is the most fragile piece of crap I've ever seen. Pretty much every package requires a PPA, even if you want the newest version of GNU software. The kernel is hopelessly outdated (a new release with 4.19 when 5.2 is about to come out? what were they thinking). When it comes to new software that isn't established yet, you're more likely to find it on AUR than as a Debian PPA. I remember wasting like 20 minutes to hunt down dependencies needed to build barrier on Ubuntu once, and it wasn't fun. I enjoy that time when netinstall made a broken install, because it wrote a fstab based on block device names, which results in a unbootable system when the install medium gets enumerated as the first block device. Installation is nonexistent, the web interface for browsing packages is unbearable, and apt is overly verbose with it's invocation. I like to be able to bring my system up to date and install new software with a single command, rather than having to chain together 3 commands, with the bottleneck being me typing them in.

Hardware compatibility with Debian is a joke, last June I couldn't install it on a Coffee Lake box because it wasn't able to recognize the NIC it had built in, and wouldn't let me through. This is what you get when you use ancient software. A "stable" distro for "getting work done" wouldn't install on my work machine. It's not up to distro maintainers to enforce misery onto users, project maintainers themselves should decide what's stable and what isn't. If something gets a new release, I expect to run it the same day, because it's been declared stable. Arch is a stable distro, there's a testing phase for every package, and stable releases are actually stable. I haven't had issues with it since I started using it as my daily drier in 2015.

[gurv]

I see a lot of negative comments about Debian but I think it's the only sane distro when you want a stable, supported experience where new stuff won't randomly break your computer.
Ubuntu-based distros used to be the best for that kind of need but since Canonical dropped the ball, the trust is gone.

I install Linux not only for me but for family and friends and I don't want to have to constantly fix things for them.
Most people don't constantly upgrade hardware and can be fine with non-bleeding edge software.
So a rolling-release distro brings nothing but troubles for them.
And aside of Debian-based distros every non-rolling release distro has way too short support (<18 months).

The only real problem with Debian as a user is the Mesa drivers.
Part of the reason why I went back to NVidia: much easier to update independently of the rest of the stack.

I'm also really surprised by people saying they had an horrible experience outside of Arch.
I've been using Mint for me and friend and family for many years and it's been smooth sailing.

[plantroon]

Some people apparently do not understand the word "stable". This thread was hard to read due to the misbelief presented. Debian developers are perfectly competent and aware of what they are doing.

It is true that old does not mean stable. One reason why I switched my servers from Arch to Debian was this notion of stability. It means, that no breaking changes will be introduced throughout the lifetime of the software. Not that it was battle-tested and is now considered stable. But that also applies as a side effect. Only security and bug fixes are applied to the software, no feature updates (but you can opt-in to those too, plus there are backports which I actively use). You may not realise this, but this is quite a lot of work to do on the side of package maintainers. Also then there Debian security team - they release timely fixes to known CVEs. Luckily, I usually have my systems secured according to best practices and CVEs rarely affect me.

Now, Debian is not a great desktop OS. Being universal, it can be used as one. But Fedora gives you a much more polished experience. I use Debian everywhere, on my desktops, servers, laptops and one day, I hope, on my mobile phone too. The company where I work runs everything on Debian. It is a very reliable distro which I strongly recommend despite all of its shortcomings (which are often easy to solve).

[pmorph]

I like debian a lot. Mostly because I only need to mess around configuring the system once, and then it's basically done until the next release upgrade.