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Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

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Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

russianhun wrote: post #45
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…

Well, your commnt implies that you have not actually read the thing you're complaining about, as "[t]he idea that Debian Stable is a good choice for all users" does not appear in the text anywhere. In fact, the opposite is stated.

[deleted]

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#52

Post by ac29 »

nickik wrote: post #14

As an Arch Linux user for years this hurts me. I can't even imagine living with all that old crufty stuff and then when you actually upgrade something you have library issues and so on. For those who are to afraid to run Arch, consider openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is as up to date (or more so) as Arch Linux but they do a lot of automated testing, plus they do a lot of automatic snapshots so you can go back if needed (that…

I think the one of the biggest things for me about stable/LTS distros aside from dealing with "old, crusty stuff", is that said software is upgraded all at once every two or three years. Doing 5 or 10 minutes of work a month looking into changelogs for packages and adjusting settings and what not is much more managable than having everything change underneath you all at once, possibly by several major versions. Its almost a miracle that stable->stable upgrades even work.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#53

Post by ac29 »

aceofspad4s wrote: post #39
craigsmansion wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I've used Arch years ago. It was a trainwreck. They had a very very bad QA and I had to reinstall every few months. The community is also full of people I wouldn't want to have around, as your own message shows. Also I don't use Gentoo to get "pointless optimisations". Ricers are the low hanging fruit that's there to be mocked. I use Gentoo because it's the best rolling out there.

>I've used Arch years ago. It was a trainwreck. They had a very very bad QA and I had to reinstall every few months.

Wow, just about the only OS I've never needed to reinstall is Arch (and I am a 99% Linux user and work and at home). My longest running install is something like 7 years on a desktop, and my laptops tend to die or get replaced on about a 3-4 year cycle.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#54

Post by pletnes »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #40
pletnes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not windows 10.

W10 runs fine on my laptop, a Thinkpad T440 with an i5-4300U, 8GB RAM and SSD. W10 does a fair few things wrong, but performance is not really one of them, unless you're on a Pentium 4 or something.

A significant fraction of the time, win10 is indexing files, running antivirus scans, running win update (multiple times a day), etc. This will often pin 1-2 cores. On my dual core i7 laptop from 2016. That’s not good performance. Since I also use ubuntu on a daily basis, I can see the benefits pretty clearly.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#55

Post by vog »

mantas wrote: post #46
majewsky wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, why bother writing a blog if you don't expect any readers? There's this hidden assumption here that "the HN crowd" = "a huge amount of visitors". The typical HN crowd for a front-page article will be on the order of 10,000 visitors. That's really not much on the scale of the internet.

Why implement premature optimisations if you expect 100 or 1000 readersa day? There's a huuuuge difference between 10k an hour or 10k a day.

This argument doesn't make any sense to me.

It might be true for self-written blog software, but amusingly those tend to have quite good performance ... either because these are static generators, or because these are rendered on the fly, but with very simple and hence fast templates.

However, there is no such excuse for popular CMS. Those have been developed over 10+ years, and have a wide range of users - small as well as large blogs.

Finally, I wouldn't call static HTML pages "premature optimization", but rather "the natural thing to do". Let's have a look at the data access pattern: On average, articles are written once, updated seldomly, and read at least 10x as often as written. With increasing popularity, this ratio shifts even more to the "read" direction. [1] Since the datasets are small (order of KiB or MiB), complete regeneration is feasible. Moreover, it is much simpler and less error-prone than caching. And you can speed up site generation with classic build tools (make, tup, etc.), if you want.

[1] That is, with increased popularity more articles are written due to the increased motivation, but disproportionally more readers will arrive.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#56

Post by Svenstaro »

coffee9 wrote: post #41
Svenstaro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I also do that and in fact, archlinux.org and all of its servers are also hosted on Arch Linux. It works really quite well and there is little reason to suspect it should be any less stable than other distros.

Last I checked the Arch website was run by a Debian box, not to mention funded by Debian.

I'm fairly knowledgeable about our (Arch Linux) infrastructure because I set up a big chunk of it. I'm not sure where our donations come from, though.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#57

Post by vog »

russianhun wrote: post #35
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…

According to support, my site just got DDoS-ed. Makes me wonder who can get THAT pissed off with an article about Debian. Anyway, it makes me feel like I'm doing something right. :D (BTW you're right, it's a cheap host and quite slow even when it's working. Site runs on Grav (flat-file CMS), which is a lot faster than e.g. WP and ilk (on the same chep host))

Thanks for clearing this up.

It's good to know that there is sane blog software out there, and that it is actually used.

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#58

Post by russianhun »

vog wrote: post #57
russianhun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to support, my site just got DDoS-ed. Makes me wonder who can get THAT pissed off with an article about Debian. Anyway, it makes me feel like I'm doing something right. :D (BTW you're right, it's a cheap host and quite slow even when it's working. Site runs on Grav (flat-file CMS), which is a lot faster than e.g. WP and ilk (on the same chep host))

Thanks for clearing this up. It's good to know that there is sane blog software out there, and that it is actually used.

I'm trying to make it insanely sane :D Looking for a better host already...

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#59

Post by kn0where »

sametmax wrote: post #31
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…

Problem is, most softwares that are NOT in the official repository are made for Ubuntu TLS, not debian stable. So if you want to install VSCode, Telegram, Skype, Stremio, Sublime Text, Python 3.6, clipgrab, steam, dukto, tilix, etc. You know that half of them won't work out of the box on debian stable. Each year it will be different ones, to make it spicier, for different reasons that can take a huge amount of time a…

Leave it to Ubuntu to invent their own Transport Layer Security standard

Re: Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?

#60

Post by nickik »

cbcoutinho wrote: post #48
nickik wrote: post #14

As an Arch Linux user for years this hurts me. I can't even imagine living with all that old crufty stuff and then when you actually upgrade something you have library issues and so on. For those who are to afraid to run Arch, consider openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is as up to date (or more so) as Arch Linux but they do a lot of automated testing, plus they do a lot of automatic snapshots so you can go back if needed (that…

I totally agree, have been a happy Tumbleweed user for over a year now. Installation is a breeze compared to Arch.

How dare you say that installing Arch is not easy?????
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