Leaderless Debian • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaderless Debian

#71

Post by bionsystem » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

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 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).

Why ? (Genuine question, I've been doing that for years (from Windows), never had a particular issue with it, even during crises. Not that I had the choice, if I did I would probably have installed Linux.)

Re: Leaderless Debian

#72

Post by xioxox » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:12 PM UTC

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.

Deb/apt might have been nicer to use, but as a packager I found the packaging format extremely horrible to work with.

There's a very complex interaction between the various files which define a package. It's extremely hard to find out what debhelper and its associated commands are actually doing and to debug them, particularly if you're trying to split a package into multiple parts. I gave up several times trying to make my package before finally succeeding with a simplified version. I'm not sure I will understand how it works when I go back to it.

On top of that the sheer volume of rules and regulations, different packaging helpers and out of date suggestions just added to the problem.

Deb has far too much magic. Rpm is much clearer. I can define a simple configuration file which takes the source, patches it, builds it, and describes the packaged files. I've never had a problem understanding an rpm source package.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#73

Post by ak217 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

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…

Yeah, I think your opinion that Red Hat leads the way in the technical foundations of Linux is quite controversial.

From my experience, Ubuntu is significantly more developer friendly and better documented than Red Hat products. Linux is used in a huge variety of ways, and in my experience Ubuntu is better at accommodating a plurality of contributors from different affiliations. Canonical also funds lots of critical Linux infrastructure work - perhaps not as much as Red Hat, I haven't compared. But my point is that I think they fund more useful things, and are better at building what feels more like a community - which yields massive dividends down the line.

This is not to say that Ubuntu is without flaws. Even with PPAs, packaging for Ubuntu/Debian is a massive pain, the recent APT vulnerability showcases shortcomings in their infrastructure, and Canonical thrashes on a lot of technologies that they really shouldn't thrash on. But in the long run their strategy is better at attracting developers, and I don't think you need to worry about them finding relevance.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#74

Post by sigi45 » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

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…

Never ever heard of your description of RedHat and why it would be a good reason to use them.

10-15 years ago i tried Red Hat / Fedora and it wasn't great. I than also tried debian and it just worked and was easy to use.

Now, i'm not looking for support much. I prefer the base stability of debian/ubuntu. Haven't looked into RedHat a long time and i also don't see any big reason for it.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#75

Post by tapoxi » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

sigi45 wrote: post #74

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…

Never ever heard of your description of RedHat and why it would be a good reason to use them. 10-15 years ago i tried Red Hat / Fedora and it wasn't great. I than also tried debian and it just worked and was easy to use. Now, i'm not looking for support much. I prefer the base stability of debian/ubuntu. Haven't looked into RedHat a long time and i also don't see any big reason for it.

Fedora has come a long way in the past 10-15 years. It's a very stable GNOME workstation distro that tends to use bleeding-edge stuff. They also have some neat ideas (like Silverblue) that are fun to play around with.

I've also found dnf/yum to be overall nicer to use than apt, the history feature is especially useful too.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#76

Post by Aloha » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

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 work on both Debian and RedHat systems, I've found Debian to have better fit, finish and polish, and better documentation as well, for example Debian continues to ship init.d scripts as a backwards compatibility mechanism. Apt also for the most part is idiot proof, that helps too.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#77

Post by bionsystem » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

towaway1138 wrote: post #23

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?

Arguably rpm/yum is still a kludge compared to dpkg/apt.

It's not, although I would admit that it's painful to learn. I spent my fair share of time learning it, and can now understand what's wrong with my configs in a split second when it doesn't work. Overall it's faster and easier to search with than apt, from my (very small, I admit) experience with apt. The dependancy system works really well, even when messing around with upgrades/downgrades/uninstalls too.

And I admit that a few years ago I would rank apt as much better than yum. Matter of preference / habit I guess.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#78

Post by ilovecaching » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

ak217 wrote: post #73

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…

Yeah, I think your opinion that Red Hat leads the way in the technical foundations of Linux is quite controversial. From my experience, Ubuntu is significantly more developer friendly and better documented than Red Hat products. Linux is used in a huge variety of ways, and in my experience Ubuntu is better at accommodating a plurality of contributors from different affiliations. Canonical also funds lots of critical…

I've found the opposite is true. Ubuntu loves to make ubuntu specific things. They made Unity, which eventually failed and led them back to GNOME. They made Mir, which eventually failed and led them back to Wayland. They made Upstart, which eventually failed and led them back to systemd. Fedora always chooses what the majority of the community wants to use and then ships the most vanilla version possible.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#79

Post by tapoxi » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

a012 wrote: post #6

exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

Amazon has Amazon Linux which is based on CentOS, and Google has invested in CoreOS which also based on CentOS just for K8s. I don't know if other vendors like DO would invest in any specific distro tbh.

CoreOS was based on ChromeOS/Gentoo. With the Red Hat acquisition of CoreOS, it will be merged with Atomic and based on Fedora/RHEL.

I think GKE's 'cos' is based on the ChromeOS/Gentoo version of CoreOS.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#80

Post by stirfrykitty » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

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 Debian is not owned by a corporation. Who knows what IBM will do with Red Hat. We all know that massive corps that buy smaller ones usually don't treat the smaller corps very well. They often buy them for the patent portfolio or tech, merge it in or kill it outright after a time.

While Red Hat has determined (sadly) the overall direction of Linux development with things like systemd (don't get anyone started on this one), PulseAudio, et al, does anyone not think this will not end up tragically?

Independent distros like Debian (who sadly adopted systemd) and Slackware (now the oldest continually developed distro, and thankfully not using systemd) need to exist. Linux hackers, both pro and amateur, need a place to tinker that is not always being broken. Both Debian and Slackware are fairly conservative distros that have a long development time. I for one favor this long development time for things I need to be rock solid.

Look at the development space as well as PaaS, Web hosting, etc. Ubuntu dominates this space. With one exception: people that need CPanel. Ubuntu is generally faster, all things considered, and definitely easier to use, upgrade, and maintain.