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

And what exactly makes software outdated?!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 The kernel is hopelessly outdated (a new release with 4.19 when 5.2 is about to come out?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.

[rastersoft]

if you enjoy outdated software and drivers that make nothing work, sure!

Use SID instead of Stable.

[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. 🐸

[eydee]

Damn, Windows 95 is dead.

[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

[R41N3R]

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

Me too, it was such a bad experience.

[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 :-)

[mulenmar]

I like Debian because, unlike pretty much every other non-Slackware distro, they haven't forgotten one teeny-tiny but oh so critical detail:

NOT EVERYONE HAS AN UNLIMITED INTERNET CONNECTION.

Not even in the "first world".

My desktop only has internet if I tether my phone, which has a hard data cap. If I want to download a bunch of packages in, say, Ubuntu, I have to trudge over to a public library and download them there, and either manually download the packages' dependencies or keep a complete VM copy of my desktop system (sans /home) on a laptop, which I then have to struggle with the library's flakey Wifi connection. They base everything around you downloading a base image, then having a connection to their mirrors for anything that isn't there.

With Debian, I can just download DVD images and checksums to a USB key and take them home. Finagling with jigdo in a VM on Windows is still a complete PITA, sure, but at least it's an option. Or, if I have money to spare, I can have a set of 14 pressed DVDs sent to me. (...it's 2019, and nobody sells pressed Blurays? Fine, whatever, I can jigdo it myself.)

If that infrastructure comes at the price of sometimes having to backport a few packages of software to make things compile, well, that's a frustration I'll live with.

I used to run Arch Linux, and to this day I still prefer pacman and the AUR -- PKGBUILDs are so much easier to understand and create than the complications of making a .deb package -- but, being a rolling-release distro, it requires constantly re-downloading the new versions. Nature of the beast, of course.

[andyprough]

Do you realize that's the D9VK developer upset that Debian 10 doesn't provide tools that are as up to date as they should be, notably MinGW, for compiling newer versions of Wine so he can do his thing which is providing us assholes a nice DX9 gaming experience using Wine?

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.

[lilunxm12]

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

use apt instead of apt-get, this time it should be asking.