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Why is Debian the way it is?

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#61

Post by pjmlp »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #11

I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…

With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#62

Post by dartharva »

Nextgrid wrote: post #55
talent_deprived wrote: post #38

Debian could be great except for driver support which they only tacitly acknowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/paxj85/why_debian_w... "We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software." I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 ye…

They've now relaxed their (stupid) policy so at least the default ISO includes non-free drivers. When it comes to an already installed system, enabling the non-free repos and installing linux-firmware (or more specific firmware-* package for your hardware) should fix it.

If the default ISO already included non-free drivers, why would you have to separately enable the non-free repos to get firmware?

My Debian 12 install didn't come with proprietary Nvidia drivers, nor did it ask me if I wanted them during installation. I had to enable the non-free-firmware repo to get them.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#65

Post by hedora »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #11

I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…

With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.

I wonder if the end-game is a BSD, or some sort of hard fork of the Linux ecosystem.

Ubuntu and RedHat basically don’t work by any of my definitions of “work”.

They’re both enterprisey and bloated and flaky in all the ways Windows was in the 90’s, except they add flatpack/snap, letting each program be its own flaky OS install, compounding the problem. Want to save a file to ~? Read this 1000 page tome on the 21 successors to SEL first.

Anyway, my current heuristic is that if it defaults to systemd or wayland, then I don’t want to use it.

Debian was never the default for big sprawling corporations, so it’s not clear to me that just staying on the “suckless ethos” side of such an ecosystem fork would be that bad vs. Linux in its previous heyday.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#66

Post by SoftTalker »

dietrichepp wrote: post #47
Aeolos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian Is there any publication quantifying this? I followed the whole debacle with interest, and my personal experience with my servers was the exact opposite: adopting systemd improved reliability and made administration significantly easier. It's sad that this was politicized by a small part of the community, but the end result was worth it.

Yeah, I agree. Systemd is incredibly controversial among a niche group of people who have strong opinions about how init & core system functionality should work, and then there’s an outer ring of people who focus on one or two problems with some relatively minor problems that Systemd caused for which there are viable workarounds. Like how Systemd terminates processes that belong to your session when you log out. I re…

Have you looked at OpenBSD?

Here's the /etc/rc.d/sshd:

  #!/bin/ksh
  #
  # $OpenBSD: sshd,v 1.7 2022/08/29 19:14:25 ajacoutot Exp $

  daemon="/usr/sbin/sshd"

  . /etc/rc.d/rc.subr

  pexp="sshd: ${daemon}${daemon_flags:+ ${daemon_flags}} \[listener\].*"

  rc_configtest() {
          ${daemon} ${daemon_flags} -t
  }

  rc_cmd $1
Pretty much any service/daemon is similar. You define a few things and you're done.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#67

Post by Dwedit »

Debian's policies also led to a heavily restricted version of RetroArch being available instead of the real version. Specifically, RetroArch has its own package management functionality built-in through its "Core Updater" feature, which downloads and installs emulators in the form of library files. This is banned by Debian because it sidesteps the whole package manager system.

Meanwhile, you can still build the full version of RetroArch from source code by installing the dependencies of Debian's source package, but building the original source code instead.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#68

Post by mjw1007 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #54
Brian_K_White wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the US constitution and the bill of rights. Everything in the bill of rights is technically redundant and covered by principles already expressed in general form in the main constitution. And yet that isn't actually good enough. Those general principles, being general rather than specific, require the key word, interpretation, in each new specific context. And different people with different goals can and d…

Can you give any examples of software projects or licenses in which there's room for genuine disagreement in interpretation of these rules? I'm having trouble imagining it.

Does a licence that says "you must distribute the source unmodified, but you're allowed to distribute patches with it and a build system that applies them" count as free?

The DFSG said yes.

Does a licence says "you may modify this and redistribute it as much as you like, but if you put it on a CD then everything else on there must also be free" count as free?

The DFSG said no.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#69

Post by talkingtab »

zajio1am wrote: post #16
talkingtab wrote: post #13

Several open source software organizations are remarkable. Not little remarkable, big remarkable. As in they show us how alternative models to the typical corporate business model may well be far superior as a way for people to collaborate. For the most part these remarkable are unknown. I have used Debian for (ahem) a very long time without knowing much about the organization and this article was a very good introdu…

> Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars ). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.50…

You are correct. A better way to put it. And it is true that the IETF working groups are often from corporate vendors.

So perhaps that part of my argument is completely wrong. And distracts from the main question: could other fundamental models of collaboration be significantly more productive (efficient) than corporate models?

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