Debian 11 "Bullseye" Cycle Prepares To Begin Long Journey

[starshipeleven]

That isn't a set in stone rule. Just an opinion who's meaning varies by distribution and person.

The meaning of "stable software" is not subject to interpretation, or is it? Did "stable software" stop meaning "does not fucking break" while I wasn't watching?

The closest to that definition is a frozen-release distro that stays in mainteneance-only mode for years. That's what any stable software does.
Webshit does not have this distinction and everything is together with new features, so the only way to fix bugs is to roll the dice on new bugs in new versions with new features.

Not all distros are "just stable". Many are "stable AND xxx" or "stable AND yyy", they make concessions on the stability side for the sake of more modern applications, for a rolling release, for a different, in-house init or package manager or whatever.

[YorkieOl]

Debian per-se isn't really into massive marketing nor has a very specific target in mind so it can't really focus.

As for the 32bit libs, don't worry. 99.99% of what is Ubuntu actually comes from Debian. Someone will just respin the same 32bit Debian packages as a PPA for Ubuntu and life will go on as usual.

I have no doubt at all that someone will release support for 32bit. Theres a lot of good folks, that's more than capable in the community. Just this 32bit thing is coming from news feeds about steam dropping ubuntu due to their actions and the following scaremongering that says "folks wanting to use programs such as wine and those on older machines."

To be honest, the vast majority are already on 64bit these days and for the most part it wont matter. But as you mention, someone will fill the void - possibly late for steam though, as they say they're already considering options.

I dont think bad on ubuntu, quite the opposite really. It's a very stable and graphical distro, with a huge and helpful community. It's great for folks who want to make the switch from ms.

There is a point though that those who want to progress with linux, may be better to move out of the box and try different things and who knows where steam may go..

[skeevy420]

The meaning of "stable software" is not subject to interpretation, or is it? Did "stable software" stop meaning "does not fucking break" while I wasn't watching?

The closest to that definition is a frozen-release distro that stays in mainteneance-only mode for years. That's what any stable software does.
Webshit does not have this distinction and everything is together with new features, so the only way to fix bugs is to roll the dice on new bugs in new versions with new features.

Not all distros are "just stable". Many are "stable AND xxx" or "stable AND yyy", they make concessions on the stability side for the sake of more modern applications, for a rolling release, for a different, in-house init or package manager or whatever.

It varies. Are we talking about a stable release of software XY; a stable release of distribution AB based on stable releases of XY, YZ, ZA, etc, with updates done in a semi-annual manner; a stable release that uses current stable releases of the aforementioned software; a stable release that freezes distribution AB's software and only provides bug fixes and security fixes.

The meaning varies by context and use-case. Debian, Mesa, Manjaro, Ubuntu XX.04 LTS, Ubuntu XX.10, Arch, Wine, KDE, Gnome, and Suse all have different definitions of what stable means.

[starshipeleven]

It varies.

No it does not.
"Stable software" means "software that does not break". This is the definition in a vacuum.

Then you are free to call anything "stable", just like Arch users, if you think that your software won't break.

[Guest]

That's why Debian Testing exists.

You can't be stable and bleeding edge at the same time, no matter what Arch fans tell you.

Except that you can. Arch is a stable distro. Have you ever read about it or looked at the repositories? Every package goes through a testing repo before it's released into the main repositories. It's not like you get whatever someone pushed to the repositories before even testing whether it works.

[starshipeleven]

Except that you can. Arch is a stable distro.

Remember what I just said?

"no matter what Arch fans tell you."

and I mean it.

People on Arch have a higher pain treshold, you just don't know it.

[skeevy420]

Except that you can. Arch is a stable distro. Have you ever read about it or looked at the repositories? Every package goes through a testing repo before it's released into the main repositories. It's not like you get whatever someone pushed to the repositories before even testing whether it works.

For the most part, yes.

I just know that it hasn't always been painless or bug free during the past decade or so of my Arch use. My system was FUBAR'd by a systemd update a few months back. A lot of us had "fun" that week. I've also encountered a few times in the past where KDE, QT, Plasma, and various frameworks were updated but stuff in the community repos weren't so they quit working until built from the AUR, the source package, or when the maintainer rebuilt it.

I'll refrain from my usual Manjaro comments.

[Slithery]

Except that you can. Arch is a stable distro. Have you ever read about it or looked at the repositories? Every package goes through a testing repo before it's released into the main repositories. It's not like you get whatever someone pushed to the repositories before even testing whether it works.

That's just not true. Only packages destined for [core] and packages that require a large rebuild of associated dependencies are put into [testing] awaiting sign-off from multiple devs. Most other packages are pushed directly into [extra] or [community] by the relevant developer (note the singular) as soon as they build correctly with no real further testing. Remember that Arch only has a handful of volunteer devs vs. the hundreds of full-time employees that some other distros have. The assumption is that the application developers will have ironed out the majority of bugs before promoting their release to a stable version.

This is also why you can find quite a few developers that target Arch when writing software. It's far more likely that bugs from Arch users are actual code issues rather than distribution-specific patches which Arch keeps to an absolute minimum. Just take a look at some of the projects that had their initial announcement on the Arch forums, a good recent example being sway.

Slithery - long-time Arch fan-boi and forum mod.

[Guest]

For the most part, yes.

I just know that it hasn't always been painless or bug free during the past decade or so of my Arch use. My system was FUBAR'd by a systemd update a few months back. A lot of us had "fun" that week. I've also encountered a few times in the past where KDE, QT, Plasma, and various frameworks were updated but stuff in the community repos weren't so they quit working until built from the AUR, the source package, or when the maintainer rebuilt it.

I'll refrain from my usual Manjaro comments.

Reading the RSS feed from archlinux.org goes a long way. The closest thing to breakage I've experienced was when I haven't removed external wine-staging repos when packages were moved into official repos, and it took me like 3 minutes to resolve the situation.

I was also hit by 4.18 issues on Core 2 Duo, but that was an upstream problem on legacy hardware. Nothing major.

As for DEs, I don't use them, so most of the time I'm just slightly annoyed that all Qt software has an upgrade at once. Not that much of a deal with a fast Internet connection and an SSD.

[Guest]

Remember what I just said?

"no matter what Arch fans tell you."

and I mean it.

People on Arch have a higher pain treshold, you just don't know it.

If Debian is so nice, how come I never have the patience to put up with it's finicky installer that craps itself in spectacular ways? Is it painful to spend 5 seconds typing in the name of an obscure piece of software I want to compile into a command for my AUR wrapper? Is spending 20 minutes looking for libraries and headers needed to compile it on Debian that much nicer?