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Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

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Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#21

Post by ZenoArrow »

digi_owl wrote: post #6
ZenoArrow wrote: post #4

Or in other words, "I use Debian Stable on my home computer and here's how I've justified it to myself". If Debian Stable does everything you want out of an operating system, by all means use it, there's no reason not to, but some other people may want to make use of the newer features of Linux and its surrounding ecosystem that aren't available in Debian Stable yet. The idea that Debian Stable is a good choice for a…

The more i have had to deal with the Linux ecosystem, the less i want to do with the bleeding edge of it. Because you will find shit breaking, willfully, every other month or so, because some caffeine addled code monkey thought he could do a decade+ usage-tested lib better in a new language over the weekend.

> "The more i have had to deal with the Linux ecosystem, the less i want to do with the bleeding edge of it."

Sure, but that's not what I was getting at. If the bleeding edge of Linux didn't have any attractive features, hardly anyone would use the features from it in their desktop OS.

Consider a use case. Take gaming for example. Let's say you want to get the best performance for gaming on Linux, so you don't have to upgrade your gaming rig to play a game that your existing rig should be able to handle. As far as I'm aware, there have been quite a few improvements made to GPU performance in recent kernels, particularly with AMD. What distro is going to be best for Linux gamers?

You could use the newer kernel with Debian Stable, but as the age of the platform grows, there's a high chance of mismatches between libraries. In other words, if you stick with the stock distro then stable branches have benefits, but if you introduce any new features that haven't been through the level of testing given to the stock components the guarantees of stability go out of the window.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#22

Post by VLM »

aceofspad4s wrote: post #7

Using Debian Stable on a desktop is probably the closer to hell that you could ever get. Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version. The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo, where you can run old software but then unmask recent stuff if you need it. As a recent example I'll say that MTP support in stable (libmtp) was flaky for my mobile phone. With Debi…

"Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version."

Everything important has been online for a long time. The web browser refresh button works fine.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#23

Post by mmjaa »

Dowwie wrote: post #19

I use Debian 9 with gnome. I don't know what I'm missing by not using one of these other distributions and don't care enough to seek out that information because I have thus far managed to do everything I need with Debian, and have used it for years. Damn. Maybe I need to look around.

I have been a Debian user forever, but my current go-to for "recommending Linux to friends" is Ubuntu Studio.

Latest release pretty much rocks, everything works smoothly out of the box, and the system is set up and ready for multimedia audio/video/etc. content creation.

It still quite Debian underneath, but there is a lot to be said for having a multimedia workstation ready to go, out of the box, on the other end of the spectrum ..

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#24

Post by pletnes »

laumars wrote: post #8
dsr_ wrote: post #5

This particular article seems to be an ad for consulting/support services, but their underlying point is one that I agree with: Desktop usage (terminals, browsers, editors, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, media listening/viewing and light creation) should not be surprising. It should not change out from underneath the user. I've run Debian Stable for more than 15 years as my primary desktop system, almo…

> The whole thing runs really nicely on an i5-2500 with 16GB RAM and 2 SSDs in a ZFS mirror. To be fair, I'd expect any OS to run nicely on that spec.

Not windows 10.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#25

Post by qznc »

willtim wrote: post #12
aceofspad4s wrote: post #7

Using Debian Stable on a desktop is probably the closer to hell that you could ever get. Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version. The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo, where you can run old software but then unmask recent stuff if you need it. As a recent example I'll say that MTP support in stable (libmtp) was flaky for my mobile phone. With Debi…

IMHO the best option currently for a stable OS with up-to-date desktop apps is NixOS. NixOS allows one to have a stable base OS then install packages in the user account from a different channel. Since it uses deterministic builds, the binary caches typically mean no building needs to happen locally. NixOS permits multiple versions of any application/library/dependency to be installed side-by-side, even libc. I run s…

There is a fundamental difference between system and applications. All common Linux distro unify them into one package management mechanism. Your comment suggests that NixOS is flexible enough to make a split.

Android and iOS clearly separate system and applications and it mostly works fine.

Ubuntu tries to split off applications via snap [0], but so far adoption seems marginal.

[0] https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/snappy

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#26

Post by Macha »

majewsky wrote: post #17
vog wrote: post #3

Site is down. Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nHJYRo... I'll never understand why serving static(!) sites is so hard. Are modern blog systems still that bad? HN traffic is far below 100 req/sec (perhaps below 10 req/sec), which should be an absolute no-brainer for any modern webserver. [1] Heck, given a good internet connection, one should be able to run 10 such blogs on a Raspberr…

> I'll never understand why serving static(!) sites is so hard. It's not hard. They're all adding stupid bloat for no good reason. When my blog was on the frontpage, traffic peaked at 1 Mbit/s (that's megabits, not megabytes) and CPU load peaked at 5% of a single core (and only because that box runs a dozen services in parallel). Everyone who's blog cannot withstand the HN crowd deserves to have their computer operat…

A couple of years ago I had a couple of articles on a static blog hit HN.

Out of the box nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 on the 1GB Linode (then the second tier) handled it perfectly fine. With no disruption to a teamspeak server that was on the same host at the time.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#27

Post by coffee9 »

majewsky wrote: post #15
digi_owl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more i have had to deal with the Linux ecosystem, the less i want to do with the bleeding edge of it. Because you will find shit breaking, willfully, every other month or so, because some caffeine addled code monkey thought he could do a decade+ usage-tested lib better in a new language over the weekend.

As a contrary anecdote, Arch Linux has only gotten more stable for me over the past years. I'm running it in multiple servers and had only one incident where a downgrade was necessary (which is not particularly hard either).

>I'm running it in multiple servers

You're the only one.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#28

Post by mantas »

majewsky wrote: post #18
FreeHugs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

challenges start at 100000 req/sec Only if you have a well configured cache in front of your cms. If you don't expect any significant traffic, it's perfectly reasonable to serve directly from your cms. And that might be super slow because optimizing a cms for perfomance does not make sense. That should be the job of a cache in front of the cms.

The best performance can be had by just dumping some .html files into a directory and pointing nginx/Apache/whatever at it. Static site generators are a thing now.

Who cares about performance for a random blog? As long as you don't get hit by HN, of course.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#29

Post by craigsmansion »

aceofspad4s wrote: post #7

Using Debian Stable on a desktop is probably the closer to hell that you could ever get. Imagine to never be able to get that one feature you need because it's only in a more recent version. The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo, where you can run old software but then unmask recent stuff if you need it. As a recent example I'll say that MTP support in stable (libmtp) was flaky for my mobile phone. With Debi…

>The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo

Get with the times, gramps. Arch is where the racing stripes are at now. Not held back by all these weird dinosaur architectures Arch can really optimise for superior speed, and features, and modern things, leaving Slackware steamboats, Debian diesels, and Gentoo petrols in the dust, because Arch is the EV of Linux operating systems.

The world of anecdata and pointless optimalisations has transcended Gentoo. You're now the Debian stable of the next generation of Linux users, and boy do they know better!

----

with apologies to any Arch and Gentoo users out there. Your OS is fine. I just thought it was amusing if you look, out of context, at these developments.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#30

Post by yorwba »

qznc wrote: post #25
willtim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the best option currently for a stable OS with up-to-date desktop apps is NixOS. NixOS allows one to have a stable base OS then install packages in the user account from a different channel. Since it uses deterministic builds, the binary caches typically mean no building needs to happen locally. NixOS permits multiple versions of any application/library/dependency to be installed side-by-side, even libc. I run s…

There is a fundamental difference between system and applications. All common Linux distro unify them into one package management mechanism. Your comment suggests that NixOS is flexible enough to make a split. Android and iOS clearly separate system and applications and it mostly works fine. Ubuntu tries to split off applications via snap [0], but so far adoption seems marginal. [0] https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/sna…

If I understand NixOS correctly, there is no explicit distinction between system and applications, and everything is handled by the same package management mechanism. The value proposition is in having clean separation between all packages, such that each application can be presented with its own mix of system packages without any conflicts between them.
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