Leaderless Debian • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaderless Debian

#91

Post by lmm » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

bionsystem wrote: post #71

craigsmansion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

The subtle differences will bite you at the worst possible time. Things like a rarely-used command flag doing something different.

I'm more of a developer than a sysadmin, but whenever I've had to use a different distro/OS on my development machine from what the servers were running, eventually I've hit a bug that only occurred on the servers and couldn't be reproduced on my development machine. And sure it's never impossible to diagnose and fix those bugs, but it's a bunch of extra effort that you just don't have to make if you're running the same distro everywhere.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#92

Post by moosingin3space » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:20 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.

I agree about Yum as of RHEL7, but dnf/yum4 are actually quite good in my experience.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#93

Post by baldfat » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

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.

I think a little Distro hopping is good for the soul. I have certainly had my time with Arch and Fedora but I have settled with OpenSUSE because it is to me the perfect distro. You can get OpenSUSE Leap a typical disto with release cycles and then there is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which is a rolling release.

By far the best cli installer with zypper and that they make it super easy to build and install with their own build system and uses repos is just best in class. All done online and can be one click just makes me wonder why the community still avoids them.

https://software.opensuse.org/find

Re: Leaderless Debian

#94

Post by craigsmansion » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #87

craigsmansion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 Why is Debian special in that respect? I once worked at a place where we ran CentOS on our workstations, and the correseponding RHEL on servers, for exactly this reason.

I think Debian is so good in its multiple roles because it's used in all these roles by its various maintainers. I don't think there has ever been a Debian "server edition" or a "desktop edition", for example.

I've always felt RH/Centos were a little less flexible when it came to desktop/laptop setups.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#95

Post by asark » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

StevePerkins wrote: post #68

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 j…

Ubuntu had saner default desktop package sets than most other distros at the time, for a good long while.

You wanted Firefox. Everyone wanted Firefox, pretty much. Obviously. Yet other distros liked to package up Epiphany or some such weirdness when you let them give you the deluxe desktop software installation. Same for lots of other categories of desktop software.

Ubuntu's defaults and the options they pushed to the front were consistently the right ones, for the time. I can only assume politics and oddball personal preferences were behind every other distro getting that so wrong for so long. And yeah it didn't matter that much if you were fine picking your own packages, but Ubuntu tested with their defaults and things worked pretty smoothly with them, plus they were mostly the programs you'd have chosen yourself, anyway. I've never seen another distro where I could just say "gimme the desktop, the whole shebang" and be more or less ready to get going when it was done—all the others it's "no, god no, give me barebones and I'll install what I want".

This is early Ubuntu, mind you. I stopped using it (and, for the most part, desktop linux generally) when they brought in PulseAudio and wrecked audio—previously among the most reliable things on my Linux systems, for almost a decade—and I basically rage-quit Linux.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#96

Post by lamby » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

wtmt wrote: post #57

> The good news is that this possibility, too, has been foreseen in the constitution. In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions — as long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things…

> Couldn't sponsorships help?

As implied and cited by the article itself, money and Debian are uneasy bedfellows.

> The last thing we need is Debian to become corporatized.

I highly doubt this will be a likely outcome here.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#97

Post by craigsmansion » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

bionsystem wrote: post #71

craigsmansion wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Apart from having to hunt down things like "putty" off the Internet (Why am I installing a binary directly from the web that I'm going to use to directly type passwords in to?),

and not even touching on exotic stuff like suddenly being in dire need of a serial terminal ("Wait, GNU Screen does that? I already have that installed!"),

it can range from simple stuff like having "man mdadm" available right there on your laptop because the wifi is spotty, to searching for stray/mysterious files by installing the same software on you laptop and doing a locate (because locate might not be installed or running "updatedb" might be inappropriate to run at that time on the server).

It's a thousand little things like that that make me feel like a fast typist/programmer who is watching someone hen peck entry forms when I watch someone administer Unix systems on Windows (and OSX, but to a lesser degree).

Re: Leaderless Debian

#98

Post by eyko » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:54 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'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.

For historical reasons. Debian was around before Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise (the last one I'm not 100%). I also remember growing up thinking Red Hat had a more enterprise focused community, whilst debian was more for the masses. Wrong perception? Perhaps, but a perception nonetheless. Practically everyone I know that used Linux back then did it also for ideological reasons tied to the free software movement. Red Hat was a company, Debian was a movement. It had a social contract: https://www.debian.org/social_contract.1.0 which aligned with most of the free software community's ideals back then. This was a time when not licensing your project under GPL and instead choosing a BSD/MIT style licence was frowned upon because "something something Microsoft BSD TCPIP stack you see?".

I imagine everyone has their reasons, mostly subjective, but the first time I got into GNU/Linux, circa 1999 with Red Hat 6 (pre-fedora days), and Debian was not yet on my radar. Fast-forward a year, and I installed Debian (I think it was "potato") on my machine, and fell in love almost instantly thanks to apt, their ethos, and just the way the entire distro was designed (relatively easy switching from stable, to testing, to edge...). Mind you, I was a very novice user and not that tech savvy, but I was (I still am) a "believer" in the free software movement. I only had a 256kbps internet connection and used to download packages sporadically. The Debian CDs came with quite a good number of packages, and I remember magazines that distributed CDs with entire repositories (you could add your CD as a repository source).

Fast forward a few years, and I had left Debian for Slackware, then FreeBSD, then Gentoo (they lured me with the "portage is like ports" hype), and then Arch Linux. I always kept my respect and admiration for the good experience I had with Debian, as a user. I never felt that for Red Hat. What always took me from one distro to the next was tooling. I'd say tooling is the number one aspect of user experience in linux distributions for a certain type of user which tends to be less tech savvy than the rest. People want to install packages that auto-configure, and then tweak if necessary. Debian gave you that (sort of). You even had unattended upgrades. Back in the early 2000s that was a real "OMG" feeling for some, myself included.

> I've also never understood the appeal of .deb or apt.

The same reason Homebrew is such a success in macOS, or chocolatey for Windows.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#99

Post by 51lver » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

patrickg_zill wrote: post #46

I am switching to Devuan which is Debian without the service manager known as systemd (not trying to flame about systemd but it is no longer my preference) . So far it has worked great for me on my test laptop and I will be rolling out some VM's shortly.

I run KVM VMs on devuan and could not be happier. (flame backspaced out, you're welcome...)

Re: Leaderless Debian

#100

Post by eikenberry » Tue, Mar 12, 2019, 6:10 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…

RHEL isn't worth the time as it is broken by design. It only includes the minimum packages for the OS relying on 3rd party repos for everything else and those 3rd party repos are generally terrible. The model is that they supply the core OS and you supply everything else, but I've never seen that in practice.

Fedora might be OK, I've never used it and I've never known anyone who used it either. It always seemed more fringe than Debian and all it's child various distros.