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Why is Debian the way it is?

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#151

Post by rascul »

dartharva wrote: post #62
Nextgrid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The default ISO didn't come with non-free drivers until the latest release (12, bookworm). Unless you used the "unofficial" image which did include them. Now the situation is different.

Here is the relevant part from the release notes:

> In most cases firmware is non-free according to the criteria used by the Debian GNU/Linux project and thus cannot be included in the main distribution. If the device driver itself is included in the distribution and if Debian GNU/Linux legally can distribute the firmware, it will often be available as a separate package from the non-free-firmware section of the archive (prior to Debian GNU/Linux 12.0: from the non-free section).

> However, this does not mean that such hardware cannot be used during installation. Starting with Debian GNU/Linux 12.0, following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, official installation images can include non-free firmware packages. By default, debian-installer will detect required firmware (based on kernel logs and modalias information), and install the relevant packages if they are found on an installation medium (e.g. on the netinst). The package manager gets automatically configured with the matching components so that those packages get security updates. This usually means that the non-free-firmware component gets enabled, in addition to main.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch02s02.en.ht...

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#152

Post by LeoPanthera »

Barrin92 wrote: post #125
LeoPanthera wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RetroArch provides a Flatpak, making this mostly a non-issue.

no, from a distribution standpoint it's a pretty grave issue. As the name suggests distributions distribute, and if we start to unbundle the OS from the application layer, Debian loses the very thing people chose it for. It's in a sense like a legacy carmaker or newsroom being more concerned with its own control than with the product. Doesn't end well over the long term.

> Debian loses the very thing people chose it for

I don't buy this. People don't choose Debian for the third party software in the repo. If they did, it's a bad choice.

People choose Debian as a rock solid and stable base OS, and it's perfectly rational to use it as a base for third party software on top from other sources.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#153

Post by mdwalters »

codedokode wrote: post #121

What I don't like in Debian: - 3rd-party software is not welcome; there is no mechanism for installing it securely because you are supposed to either install software from official repository or compile what you have written yourself. For example, if you want to install Sublime Text, or VS Code, there is no way to do it securely, without giving untrusted software access to your browser history and SSH keys. Of course…

> if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records or crash dumps and you will never figure out why it crashed

On Fedora you can use ABRT (AKA Problem Reporting) to view logs and tracebacks of a component that has crashed, and report the problem via Bugzilla. Also, GNOME isn't a system component, Fedora would still work without it, but it would use a TTY terminal instead.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#154

Post by hnfong »

rlpb wrote: post #139
codedokode wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually developer of application tests it only with a specific version of a library. If you use another version of library, you need to carefully test it and fix all found bugs and I am not sure if Debian has resources to do it. So we can assume that they simply use untested combinations of libraries and hope that everything will be ok (it won't).

As if this isn't an issue with fast-moving "let's bundle everything" upstream code drops either? Distribution releases have the advantage that they have a large number of followers who share the same set of versions, and so can shake out the issues and fix the bugs together. In practice I think this beats what most upstreams that each pick their own sets of versions can achieve on their own. It only takes one skilled…

Not to mention that if you run 10 apps daily and have 50 more installed, you really don't want to be running 40 different versions of GTK/QT/whatever.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#155

Post by Karellen »

codedokode wrote: post #147
Karellen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if you want to install Sublime Text, or VS Code, there is no way to do it securely, without giving untrusted software access to your browser history and SSH keys. First, if you don't trust a bit of software, why are you installing it? But more importantly - you don't want your text editor to be able to open and edit your browser history files, or your ssh key files? If my text editor wasn't able to ope…

Even if you trust the developer (I don't), there is a chance that there is a bug or vulnerability in the software. Also you need to install different plugins from random anonymous guys from Github, and it is difficult to trust an anonymous person.

> Also you need to install different plugins from random anonymous guys from Github

Do I? Strange, I've never noticed needing to do that myself.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#156

Post by Barrin92 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #152
Barrin92 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, from a distribution standpoint it's a pretty grave issue. As the name suggests distributions distribute, and if we start to unbundle the OS from the application layer, Debian loses the very thing people chose it for. It's in a sense like a legacy carmaker or newsroom being more concerned with its own control than with the product. Doesn't end well over the long term.

> Debian loses the very thing people chose it for I don't buy this. People don't choose Debian for the third party software in the repo. If they did, it's a bad choice. People choose Debian as a rock solid and stable base OS, and it's perfectly rational to use it as a base for third party software on top from other sources.

>If they did, it's a bad choice.

It's an excellent choice. Debian provides about 60k software packages compared to say 15k in the Fedora repos. Debian and derivatives vastly outnumber other distributions in terms of available software, it's what drove Ubuntu's popularity, everything's available on it.

You can use it as a stable base OS, but it doesn't have any particular advantage, and even some disadvantages compared to RedHat or Suse distributions which offer you many more enterprise tools like Yast out of the box, package managers that are able to do atomic and reversible transactions, which apt still does not do, and so on.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#157

Post by jamesgeck0 »

rlpb wrote: post #149
jamesgeck0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering tradeoffs are always tradeoffs. One is not strictly better than the other from the user's perspective. Mandating shared dependencies means that Debian is often running software against a dependency version that the original author did not develop against or test against. Sometimes the Debian package is effectively a fork. This results in Debian-specific bugs which get reported upstream. Distribution-speci…

You seem to assume that Debian users are hapless and are ending up in these situations by accident. That's not true. Most users choose Debian's model because they want to use software maintained by people who care about their use cases. They use old versions of software by choice, because they want a platform that doesn't change under their feet. Others use Debian or something Debian-based because it is popular, but…

I was a contributor to a small Linux desktop application ages ago. We absolutely had a regular flow of hapless users who installed the Debian-provided package and reported bugs that either never existed in upstream builds or had been fixed months before. I believe the situation was that Debian had packaged an obsolete version of the software for stable because of a misunderstanding of the versioning system. When upstream discovered the mistake and contacted them, they refused to update it to a modern version. Instead, they requested that we maintain their fork and backport literal years of fixes.

This situation resulted in Debian distributing a broken version of our software for several years. I did not come away with positive impressions of their packaging processes.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#158

Post by cassianoleal »

colanderman wrote: post #135
jwilk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The "apt" frontend was added in 2014 and included in a stable release in 2015. So I don't know what tool other than apt-get could "guides first written before 2015" use.

aptitude. And before that, dselect (which I believe predated APT entirely).

Oh my, I don't miss the dselect days.

OTOH aptitude is, to this day, a joy to use.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#159

Post by rlpb »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #157
rlpb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to assume that Debian users are hapless and are ending up in these situations by accident. That's not true. Most users choose Debian's model because they want to use software maintained by people who care about their use cases. They use old versions of software by choice, because they want a platform that doesn't change under their feet. Others use Debian or something Debian-based because it is popular, but…

I was a contributor to a small Linux desktop application ages ago. We absolutely had a regular flow of hapless users who installed the Debian-provided package and reported bugs that either never existed in upstream builds or had been fixed months before. I believe the situation was that Debian had packaged an obsolete version of the software for stable because of a misunderstanding of the versioning system. When upst…

> because of a misunderstanding of the versioning system

> ...

> I did not come away with positive impressions of their packaging processes

I am not coming away with positive impressions of your upstream versioning or release processes :)

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#160

Post by starttoaster »

hedora wrote: post #65
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 succe…

Perhaps that is the end game for you. My intent isn’t to say this to stir heated discussion but people have different opinions on flatpak and snap, in fact I even like snap besides the fact that you have to use snap’s store (you can’t just start your own snap repository and configure your local snapd to install from it.) No complaints with systemd, and you can still easily swap to Xorg. No idea what you’re referring to with the trouble of saving a file to ~, perhaps that’s a RHEL thing (it’s been so long since I’ve used RHEL.)

All in all, my intent is mostly just to say we’re not in consensus. I doubt a massive revolution is coming if your assumption is that it is because there’s some overwhelming majority with your opinions.

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