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Leaderless Debian

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Re: Leaderless Debian

#61

Post by oarsinsync »

jonhohle wrote: post #37
oblio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linux had/has more mainstream support than FreeBSD, unfortunately, so ports/pkg never really got the attention and love it deserved.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#62

Post by craigsmansion »

ilovecaching wrote: post #42
oblio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So I've heard this before, and I really want to know what are the things that make apt better? The only thing I can see is that yum was pretty slow (dnf seems to be marginally better). Otherwise, the rpm package format seems pretty on par with deb and apt seems like a super crusty interface with multiple commands and stuff.

> I really want to know what are the things that make apt better?

For apt as a format probably not so much anymore. For the Debian apt repositories it's the several thousand capable and driven maintainers.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#63

Post by ilovecaching »

belorn wrote: post #60
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…

Debian is a community project based on the practical willingness of individuals to work on fixing problems, usually ones that affect themselves. Red Hat is a company solving problems for customers. Two different approaches that sometimes align into similar solutions and sometimes don't. A good example is the Initramfs-tools that debian created. Before (most, all?) distros just had a bunch of shell scripts mostly conc…

I guess I don't understand, because Fedora is also a community driven project. Anyone can contribute to packaging, steering, designing, etc. not just Redhat employees.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#64

Post by ilovecaching »

porker wrote: post #52
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 once getting started ~20 years ago (first with FreeBSD, then dabbled in Slackware, then Debian => Linux) re-learning the location of config files is not a priority and indeed I would avoid like the plague. Remembering slight syntax changes between distros / CLI switches that work on one but not another / similes (does this platform use "remove" or "uninstall"?) is the bane of my life. Also I have never got on…

I guess that's why I am sticking with Redhat. I don't really want to maintain two ecosystems worth of cognitive load, and I have yet to work for a company that didn't highly value RHEL skills, whereas Ubuntu has only been valued at help desks for desktop support.

Also, the Redhat docs have been great training material, and I think they are worth paying money for.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#65

Post by belorn »

ilovecaching wrote: post #63
belorn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is a community project based on the practical willingness of individuals to work on fixing problems, usually ones that affect themselves. Red Hat is a company solving problems for customers. Two different approaches that sometimes align into similar solutions and sometimes don't. A good example is the Initramfs-tools that debian created. Before (most, all?) distros just had a bunch of shell scripts mostly conc…

I guess I don't understand, because Fedora is also a community driven project. Anyone can contribute to packaging, steering, designing, etc. not just Redhat employees.

Fedora was not the one making the decisions in regard to the rather specialized area of initial boot. Why that is can only be speculated, but I would hazard a guess that when there is an incentive conflict between what is best for redhat and what is best for fedora, focus of both will go where they align. Path of least resistance and all that.

I would also guess that the small number of developers that work within such niche area was basically all hired by redhat during the earlier days. Not with nefarious intention mind you but simply out of good business practice.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#66

Post by craigsmansion »

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'm not really sure who the target audience of debian is.

A part of their core users are admins that don't get paid by the hour.

And since we're being controversial, any good admin should run debian (or maybe ubuntu) if they had the choice, if only because you can run the same system on your laptop and on the servers. Watching someone manage their Redhat/centos servers from OSX (or even Windows) is just painful to watch, especially if something is wrong or down (which is usually when you need an admin the most).

> what debians end goal is.

There is no end goal, it's simply a group of people making a distribution of software they use themselves. It's partly a matter of convenience.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#67

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

sametmax wrote: post #35
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.

^this plus literally 1999 was my first Debian install. Three floppy disks, what could be the problem? It installed on the first machine I threw at it (thank you 3Com and Intel). And it solved enough problems that I knew I could throw it at the next system I installed. & etc.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#68

Post by StevePerkins »

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…

When Ubuntu came along, it was VASTLY more friendly for laptop and desktop use than the other flavors of its day. Hardware that required me to tweak config files in RedHat "just worked" with Ubuntu. It was much simpler to install Java for development. Etc.

So I read all of the holy wars about APT vs. RPM, Unity vs. whatever, etc. I can imagine that LTS support is important to a lot of people.

But honestly, for me I just spent 10 years learning Ubuntu on my local machine. So in a situation where a developer like me gets to influence which OS will be used on the servers (a situation that happens surprisingly often!), I'll generally go with what I know. I suspect that this is the origin story for most of Ubuntu's base.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#69

Post by LIV2 »

craigsmansion wrote: post #66
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'm not really sure who the target audience of debian is. A part of their core users are admins that don't get paid by the hour. And since we're being controversial, any good admin should run debian (or maybe ubuntu) if they had the choice, if only because you can run the same system on your laptop and on the servers. Watching someone manage their Redhat/centos servers from OSX (or even Windows) is just painful to…

Watching someone try and plug their linux laptop into a projector is more painful.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#70

Post by orev »

liuw wrote: post #43
oblio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upvoted you. Yes, APT was the major reason I chose Debian 15 years ago. It was much better than RPM without YUM (it wasn't part of RH systems back then IIRC). Nowadays the competitive edge of APT could have diminished, but I never looked else where because I have been quite happy with APT.

Yum has been around for so long that I really can’t believe people still bring this up. Even a decade after yum came around, I still heard Debian people comparing “rpm” vs “apt”, which is a completely apples to oranges comparison. I can only assume that those Debian people were so out of touch with other distros that their opinions could not be trusted.
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