Don't panic and keep forking Debian • Hacker News Board

I'm for sure not feeling the love for systemd, it seems un-UNIX and a solution looking for a problem, and change for the sake of change. That said, not so big on the idea about a fork, I'd rather see debian do the normal debian thing, and support both things, maximizing freedom. That said, if that can't happen, a fork is inevitable - for the love of god pick a better name.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#14

Post by secfirstmd » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:20 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user.

You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#15

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:22 AM UTC

secfirstmd wrote: post #14

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user. You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.

And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#16

Post by anw » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:22 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

"I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today."

To a point it could be beneficial, but then we would hit the same wall we're coming to here. Over all, you do not need a large group of developers to work on a project. You just need people who have a specific knowledge in order to add features and fix bugs.

Too many people trying to all work on the same thing can lead to too many ideas on how to proceed ahead.

Another idea is having a form of management to help guide people towards more system complementary projects, rather than recreating the wheel.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#17

Post by seccess » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:22 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it."

Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#18

Post by TheCondor » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:22 AM UTC

Is there a single name associated with this? A single developer's name? And they are requesting donations?

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#19

Post by krylon » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:24 AM UTC

Assuming this actually going somewhere, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it might allow us to get over those intense - and usually pointless - arguments (to put it politely) about systemd. (Personally, I don't have very strong feelings about systemd, but I get the impression it could use some time to mature before becoming the centerpiece of a GNU/Linux system.)

If the fork gave people the choice between "Debian with systemd" and "Debian without systemd", and if that was all there was to it, that would be really sweet. But given the circumstances of the fork, it is not exactly clear how the two distros would coordinate their development, possibly resulting in eventual divergence.

Also, if the project catches on, this might lead to a kind of brain drain on Debian, replacing one - up until now - great distribution with two less impressive ones. (This is of course a worst-case scenario. There might be, three years from now, a lot of sharing of code and people between the two distros. I sure hope so.)

It is surely a very interesting development, but it remains to be seen whether this is good or bad news or even news at all.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#20

Post by Paul_S » Sat, Nov 29, 2014, 1:24 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

I run windows in a VM to run lightroom. Similar situation except my experience about stability is the exact opposite.

> Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions.

If everyone keeps pulling in the same direction you might end up in a dead end. With a plurality of approaches natural selection comes into effect.

Anyway, how do you propose to force volunteers to do your bidding when they have different ideas? Sometimes ideas are mutually exclusive.