Debian Might Abandon Their Live Images

[fld-]

Just yesterday, I made a PXE bootable Debian 9 KDE live system with live-build on jessie.
Then I found out about live-build being deprecated in favor of live-wrapper, which is only available starting from stretch.
Then I found out about pre-made Debian KDE live-images and figured I might as well just use those... Or should I.. :P

[DMJC]

Meh, I just use Ubuntu to bootstrap my Debian install. It's no big deal.

[Anvil]

im not against it, it costs to much money an time to produce Live Images, plus one could/can still burn an netinstall or whatever to CD rather than a DvD

[sarmad]

I use the live CD so I can do some web browsing while the installation happens. I also use it often to do things like resizing partitions and stuff like that before proceeding with the installation.

[AndyChow]

I haven't in years. Just use the Arch one when I need it. They don't even make the standard live image, just the ones with desktop environments. I just tried with the regular install disk, and you can still ctrl-alt-f (f2, etc, not the letter f) to a terminal. It seems a bit limited.

Actually, I just did a few tests, and damn I'm getting old and obsolete. Just about none of the old tricks work anymore. They have nano but not vi?

[torsionbar28]

I don't really see the value any more in the live images. Virtualization has become commodity and common place, and anyone savvy enough to be interested in trying a Linux disto, can install it under Virtualbox or VMware or KVM, as a VM and test it out. No need to reboot your PC and boot up a disc.

Those who use a live CD to perform diagnostics and repairs know Knoppix is the leader, by far.

[Cyber Killer]

I also stopped using live cds for anything other than fixing a system, and even then I prefer to use a dedicated one like system rescue cd or something similar. A regular desktop live distro usually doesn't even have the neccessary tools.

Something that I would welcome instead of a live cd would be an option to do an install (with custom packages etc) to a usb drive, which I can take with me and boot any machine as my own desktop with persistent storage and everything. This is somewhat covered by livecds but without the "storage" and "custom" parts.

[GreatEmerald]

GPartEd is very important and is based on Debian! Though they don't use KDE or any other fancy things like that, so I guess they are unaffected by most of the problems.

As for the uses for a LiveCD, I use one extensively lately: on university PCs Windows (7!) is installed, and that's useless to me. They are pretty powerful and have a lot of disk space, so I run a LiveCD to do the scientific processing tasks without messing up the Windows installation. I could do that off an external HDD with a distribution installed on it, but I'm dealing with huge raster images, so space is at a premium. The LiveCD solution works well (I'm using the openSUSE Tumbleweed LiveCD), provided that the USB stick is fast enough.

[john_j]

I'm curious about the reason that Debian is having this difficulty. Have they lost developers and if so why?

[discordian]

Live-CDs are a very usefull tool in evaluating whether a PC will work out-of-the-box or some unsupported or buggy GPU will need tender and continuous care.
The only problem I see, is that those Live-CD are some baseline installations and mostly everyone will find some different piece missing (or unnecessary and wasting space).

Maybe a debian supported community-project to easily build such CDs would be the best way forward, there already are unofficial debian Live-Cds with binary blobs included.