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Leaderless Debian

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Re: Leaderless Debian

#31

Post by smhenderson »

joshstrange wrote: post #27

> Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things. Is this sarcasm? I don't read LWN enough to know if they are dryly joking and I don't read Debian listserv's to know if it's true or not.

Before, when Debian Wheezy was the current stable version, I would have read this and assumed no sarcasm and agreed wholeheartedly. But these days, I'm with you, I just can't tell.

Given the recent article by Michael Stapleburg[1] that made it to the front page of HN the other day and now this it seems like things are a bit rocky at Debian these days.

A shame too because even though I don't use it that much any more I still consider it one of, if not the, most important Linux distributions available. Hopefully this is just a glitch that will get sorted sooner than later!

[1] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

Re: Leaderless Debian

#32

Post by ilovecaching »

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble.

I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them and they lead efforts like cgroups v2), and other highly technical pieces of the ecosystem, including acquiring all of the start developers (such as the systemd folks). Investing in Redhat is an investment into a deeper understanding of LInux through their excellent documentation and well paying positions through their famously good certifications.

There is of course a lot of debian and ubunutu out there in small deployments, usually individuals, small buisnesses, and education, but they are ultimately less lucrative and more oriented towards beginners/hobbyists. At least Ubuntu used to be. I'm not really sure who the target audience of debian is.

I've also never understood the appeal of .deb or apt, or what debians end goal is. They never seem to be doing anything that interesting except grinding away at repackaging everything. Canonical is just flailing to find some sort of niche and historically (Ubuntu phone, Mir, Open Stack, Upstart, probably snap) they are incredibly bad at finding relevance. I think having multiple packaging ecosystems is the stupidest idea in the world, and don't see the value add except giving people the illusion of more choices.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#33

Post by oblio »

ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum.

If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt.

In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#34

Post by mikepurvis »

the_trapper wrote: post #22
flowless wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it gets obsolete as it's an abomination.

How is it an abomination? It seems to have served its purpose well so far. It is relatively easy to use and hasn't gotten in the way of anything I've wanted to use it for yet.

Am not the parent, but RPi is the only ARMv6 target of any significance; supporting an outdated architecture has non-trivial costs, which is why Ubuntu and other distros dropped the support.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#35

Post by sametmax »

ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

Because 10 years ago ubuntu supported way more configurations out of the box and was more user friendly for laptops and desktops. And now nobody wants to spend time trying something new: don't fix what's not broken.

I have no incentive to ever install anything else than Ubuntu on my laptop given the investment I've done to get used to it. And on servers, I use Ubuntu just because I know it.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#36

Post by shaklee3 »

ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

Investing in RedHat is typically also investing a lot of money to lock yourself in to a larger ecosystem. I know why they do it, and that's because it's easier for support, but requiring you run RHEL to use openshift (maybe that's changed?) is a real problem for a lot of companies. Also, RHEL and Centos' packages tend to be extremely outdated in the name of security. For some of us, those new features are needed.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#37

Post by jonhohle »

oblio wrote: post #33
ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum. If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt. In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

I’ve never understood the pure love for apt. Ports/pkg is better. Gentoo’s package manager is better. Even yast was better (imho).

Once I needed a package from an external repository, apt has almost always fallen down into a pit of duplicate and incompatible dependencies. Maybe it’s better now, but I was burned long ago and never looked back.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#38

Post by marmaduke »

shaklee3 wrote: post #36
ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

Investing in RedHat is typically also investing a lot of money to lock yourself in to a larger ecosystem. I know why they do it, and that's because it's easier for support, but requiring you run RHEL to use openshift (maybe that's changed?) is a real problem for a lot of companies. Also, RHEL and Centos' packages tend to be extremely outdated in the name of security. For some of us, those new features are needed.

what drew me to CentOS was all that comprehensive free documentation produced for RHEL that no other distribution seems to ha e. I don’t think that can be done if you have consider package updates as in Deb

Re: Leaderless Debian

#39

Post by marmaduke »

ilovecaching wrote: post #32

Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints outside of my thought bubble. I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the maintainers work for them…

I did a Deb to CentOS switch for an HPC cluster last year, I have to say the docs for CentOS, produced by RedHat for RHEL, are great and a big factor that you don’t mention

Re: Leaderless Debian

#40

Post by ahartmetz »

joshvm wrote: post #12
gekkeboom wrote: post #7

What whould be the case today anno 2019 to use Debian over CentOS, Ubuntu or one of the other distro's?

Debian is all over the place in embedded. It's pretty much the de-facto distribution (you see Yocto, Arch, Ubuntu server etc too) for consumer boards. Not sure what the distribution is in private industry, but typically manufacturers provide Debian images at a minimum. This is a problem for embedded systems because you're relying on a company to provide hardware-specific patches. While those are typically kernel patc…

From my experience in private industry, almost everybody uses Yocto.
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