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

[jojo7887]

Being a Debian Stable user myself I can say it's not a bad release and far from useless, it is however limited in certain aspects such as Vulkan development and the Mesa driver stack. From a gamer's point of view the Stable release is only really usable if you're using an Nvidia GPU and that's the extent of it.

I never had any issues with my setup and it always works the way I want it.

[moilami]

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.

No, it is not the only one and openSUSE Leap 15.1 is among those which are even better.

[Guest]

Damn, Windows 95 is dead.

Yes, also Windows 10.

[gojul]

This release is much much better than Stretch was on KDE. The latter was rather unstable and unreliable.

[skeevy420]

snip

I don't know if you read my post the other day, but I used to run Debian and had to do 20 mile round trips to sync the repositories to a USB drive because the place I lived in didn't have internet available (still doesn't, but I don't live there anymore) so I 100% get where you're coming from. I used a laptop, apt-mirror, and a 2TB USB HDD.

Manjaro is a nice compromise to Arch wanting to download an update every other hour. There's the usual weekly/biweekly updates and security fixes when necessary. For my needs, that's perfect. I know that I'm really up-to-date with whatever project's stable release, I'm using something that's been more tested than Arch, and I have a helpful community when I shoot myself in the foot. There isn't much more that I could ask for other than, "bridgman & AMD, would y'all please consider Manjaro for AMDGPU-Pro?".

These days if I were in a limited or no internet position I'd use Manjaro over Debian because I consider it to be a better all-around desktop OS.

As far as noob level easy and supporting family -- My Mom used to run Manjaro (XFCE) and I never once had to fix a problem for her. All I did was spend an hour installing it and getting it set up in an very easy to use manner and it worked perfectly until that laptop went bad and she replaced it with an Android tablet (an Android tablet better suites her needs over AnyOS on a laptop). Two and a half years of use and updates, Linux noob with no concept of a terminal, and I never once had to fix anything for her.

She went from Vista to Manjaro because native Vista could played videos very choppy and they worked flawlessly on a Manjaro live disk (mainly Netflix, but it effected DVDs and everything else). I did every trick and program I knew of to try to get Vista to work for her, tested a Manjaro Live to see if it was an OS issue, and when she saw how much faster and responsive it was combined with videos actually working, that's what she wanted to use.

While anecdotal, not having to deal with family and their computer issues is a godsend. I know damn well that all of us Phoronix posters are family tech support so y'all 100% get that.

Pacman and PKGBUILDs are why I refuse to leave the Arch Family. So simple, yet, powerful.

[increasechief]

Rolling distros remain important -- namely that they provide a user base for bug finding, as these are bugs you will never see when using Debian. So
I think scoffing about old packages is a bit misleading. More time should naturally equate to more patches especially for popular packages. I could raise numerous examples where not updating except for a critical fix has ultimately made the scientific work I do less headache prone.

I study CS and have a desktop on testing and my laptop is now on Buster and have never had the slightest usability issue, in fact my experience has been that I have fewer problems than the users of other distros.

[Vistaus]

Most people don't constantly upgrade hardware and can be fine with non-bleeding edge software.

That's not the only reason to need newer versions of software. Even on older hardware, if you need (to do) something that requires a newer version of something, you're out of luck with Debian Stable. So stop throwing the "hardware upgrade" argument already!

And aside of Debian-based distros every non-rolling release distro has way too short support (<18 months).

EVERY? Really? So Red Hat is lying to us when they say they support releases 10 years?

[andyprough]

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. 🐸

"I have tried package x on sid and it didn't work" - well, sid is unstable. So that outcome isn't a complete shock. When I need bleeding edge stuff, I use openSUSE or Parabola (Arch). Good luck to you though, sounds like you are doing important work. Sorry about my snarky comment earlier about not being able to run Debian. It is clearly not the best tool for every task.

[Guest]

What I like of Debian is its two years life of each stable release (well, in the far past that wasn't true ). Then, its package system: it has a strong dependencies checking but it not let you pass it over in any way.
Debian isn't a rolling release. Although it try to make available a lot of software updates or upgrades, even the kernel, many apps remain to its initial version until the end. Lastly, you don't need to install a new version of the OS every six months, or make a full system update with untested software every month. I think a stable OS should be stable until it remains installed in our PC.

[mulenmar]

snip

It's funny that you say Vista was the point she wanted to switch -- it was for me, too. Back then, I tried Ubuntu ....6.06, I think it was? If it wasn't that, it wasn't anything later than 7-something. Things were much more difficult back then!

I needed more ability to slim down the OS for performance on my old hardware than Windows Vista allowed, and XP both wasn't much better, had driver support issues on the newest hardware I had available, and had too many security issues for my comfort.

Thanks for the Manjaro suggestion, I'll look into it once I can finally get these Debian Buster images downloaded.