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Good-bye Debian

Posted 08-13-2014 at 04:46 AM by Randicus Draco Albus

I have been a great fan of Debian for the last few years.
1) The commitment to producing a quality system with rock-solid stability.
2) Commitment to the cause of free software.
The result was a reliable system that I was proud to use, knowing I was doing my very small part in contributing to the cause of free software.

Those days are unfortunately past.
By rushing to adopt systemd while it is still in development, the developers abandoned the Debian policy of only including well-tested software in the system. And for the purpose of adopting something that is counter to the *NIX philosophy of simplicity and modularity.

With the ranks of Debian's developers being infiltrated by Canonical employees, the last few years have seen the Buntising of Debian. Synaptic added to a default installation; Debian fora inundated with sudo this, sudo that; etc. Of course I have been accused of being conspiracy-minded, but I see it as Shuttleworth's desire to take over Debian. And a merger is now within the realm of possibility. Debian developers (many of whom are also Canonical employees) are now discussing the feasibility of letting Ubuntu maintain the kernel! Are we honestly expected to believe that a project as large as Debian has insufficient resources to maintain the distribution's version of the kernel? If that is true, it would be indicative of a serious problem.

With Debian's developers making questionable decisions, some that even go against the distribution's philosophy, I find myself no longer able to recommend the system to anyone. Debian's new course of development resulted in me switching to Slackware. It is lamentable to see a once great distribution embark on a journey of self-destruction.
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Comments

  1. Old Comment
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by goumba View Comment
    The BSDs will need a DE for their systems, unless they themselves implement a systemd-ish functionality. The XFCE devs should jump on this. It will help both XFCE, and the BSDs.
    This logic is so incredibly broken as I understood it (please correct me if I misunderstood...XFCE already runs on the BSD's, so I may be mis-reading you)...

    The BSD's will need a DE that implements systemd functionality, because the big DE's on linux are moving that direction? XFCE needs to update to systemd functionality...because the big DE's on Linux are moving that direction?

    How about quit using the big DE's that are "forcing" everyone's hand? Suddenly XFCE devs can focus on...you know...developing XFCE instead of bending to gnome's will. Suddenly the BSD's don't need to expend a ton of their already limited developer resources just to appease ***a different operating system***.

    Think of it like this...there are "standards" (such as POSIX) that allow application developers to move their applications more easily between operating systems. Linux is basically pushing for a new standard. The BSD's may very well implement a minimalist version of said standard (as you've linked for OpenBSD) that calls native pre-existing code, but a "compatibility layer" is a very different beast than all 550+ thousand lines of code of systemd.

    As much as I hate to say it, if systemd were ever pushed as a hard requirement, and the BSD's had to port it to survive, I'd go back to school for philosophy and stop using computers altogether.
    Posted 08-23-2014 at 02:40 PM by rocket357 rocket357 is offline
    Updated 08-23-2014 at 02:41 PM by rocket357
  2. Old Comment
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rocket357 View Comment
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by goumba
    The BSDs will need a DE for their systems, unless they themselves implement a systemd-ish functionality. The XFCE devs should jump on this. It will help both XFCE, and the BSDs.
    This logic is so incredibly broken as I understood it (please correct me if I misunderstood...XFCE already runs on the BSD's, so I may be mis-reading you)...
    What I meant was that as the BSDs, without systemd functionality, may need a full DE does not need systemd and that this would be an opportunity for XFCE to push to become *the* DE for the BSDs. Of course there is Lumina, but that's nowhere ready for regular usage. In the end, both would benefit.

    I know XFCE will run on the BSDs. XFCE development is slow. As people want to jump from GNOME and KDE, they'll be looking for something as powerful, and that's where I said this whole systemd thing may provide the devs with the kick in the rear they need.
    Posted 08-23-2014 at 03:12 PM by goumba goumba is offline
    Updated 08-23-2014 at 03:14 PM by goumba
  3. Old Comment
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by goumba View Comment
    I saw that about Lumina a whiole back. Cool stuff.

    However now we're going to have even more fragmentation in FOSS... can this ever be a good thing?
    The sad reality is corporate control has permeated the open source world to the extent that it is irrevocably broken. Unless something new is developed, "fragmentation", the end is nigh. Xfce already has some Gnome, I cannot think of a better word, compatibility. It will follow Gnome into the dark realm of systemd. KDE probably will also jump on the band wagon, instead of going their own way.
    Posted 08-23-2014 at 05:43 PM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline
  4. Old Comment
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by goumba View Comment
    this would be an opportunity for XFCE to push to become *the* DE for the BSDs.
    There are two camps of thought on this. One is that there should be tighter integration to provide a more seamless "experience" for the end user. The other camp is all about choice. Unfortunately, more choice tends to lead to a less "coherent" system and more fragmentation.

    In the end, it breaks down into "aesthetics" or "functionality". A purely coherent system such as Mac OS X or Windows doesn't give you the flexibility that old Linux or the BSD's give, whereas old Linux and the BSD's don't give you the "seamless" experience that Mac OS X and Windows provide.

    I could give a crap less about aesthetics, personally, so I don't believe there should be a "*the* DE" for the BSDs (well, OpenBSD...not really concerned with Free/Net/Dragonfly). I am a strict minimalist when I can get away with it, so having all of my fonts or icons match is meaningless to me (you will find no icons on my "desktop" and I use the default system font, whatever that may happen to be)...I do recognise, however, that my point of view on the topic is not the only way to view the situation. systemd pulls together many disparate pieces of the system into one "coherent" manager. It's neat for some, but from the point of view of flexibility it really hurts. Just like the switch to mobile really hurts the ability to build custom computers =P

    In the end, this is the direction Linux is going. I don't like it, truth be told, but it is what it is.
    Posted 08-24-2014 at 03:30 PM by rocket357 rocket357 is offline
    Updated 08-24-2014 at 03:32 PM by rocket357
  5. Old Comment
    Posted 08-27-2014 at 05:45 PM by rokytnji rokytnji is offline
  6. Old Comment
    Yea! A reason to not use the system. But then, I ruled it out at this point:
    Quote:
    To increase the distribution's user friendliness, Flash player and many multimedia codecs are installed and pre-configured for immediate use.
    Another such distribution?
    Posted 08-28-2014 at 04:39 PM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline
  7. Old Comment
    Well, it is what the majority wishes AND it keeps post count down on
    "my dvd won't play in vlc" or what ever.

    I have my own gripe with Chromebooks AND ChromeOS support myself.
    But this is your rant so I'll stay on topic.

    So I guess you gotta cut the Pardus folks a break on the codec thing and flashplayer because it cuts back on support posts. You already have seen the clueless main stream Kali users who think running Kali makes them hackers and cool or something. Though they have no reason, skill set, or right, to run such a distro other
    than to hack into their neighbors wireless router.

    At least it is not that bad.
    Posted 08-29-2014 at 08:32 PM by rokytnji rokytnji is offline
  8. Old Comment
    I figured I should update this blog, since a month or two ago I migrated to BSD. I decided to leave Linux behind, because the rot destroying Debian is simply a symptom of the disease infecting Linux. I had enough of the hostile corporate takeover and the hordes of users who believe a Windows clone is a good thing. Consider me a happy OpenBSD user.
    Posted 10-22-2014 at 05:41 AM by Randicus Draco Albus Randicus Draco Albus is offline
 

  



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