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Leaderless Debian

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Re: Leaderless Debian

#101
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

Ahh SUSE... the one I wanted to use 2001-2005 but didn't because it was a big greedy commercial company behind it.

The idiocies of youth. Now I kinda wish I'd made that commitment. Must check it out again.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#102

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…

For me: Last I checked, debian had a lot more packages which worked together (Wikipedia says it's currently ~70,000 to Fedora's ~20,000, and RHEL's "3000 + 9000 from EPEL").

Notably after running Debian on my servers for years, I tried getting the same setup on RHEL to see how it compared - starting with getting nginx running. On debian it was "apt install nginx". on RHEL, nginx wasn't available from the main repo so I had to use an unofficial third party. The third party binary didn't work so I tried to compile from source. Compiling from source failed because some libraries were missing. Those libraries also weren't in the rhel repo. The third party repo had some, but they were out of date. Trying to compile the libraries from source, one of them used Scons rather than Autoconf, so I tried to install that. RHEL didn't even include the basic popular (at the time) build tools, so I decided to give up rather than compile my entire stack from scratch bypassing the package manager :P

Re: Leaderless Debian

#103
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

Can you sell me on SUSE a little bit more?

Re: Leaderless Debian

#104
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

SUSE was my first distro in college back in the late 90s. My first job was my exposure to Debian, and I've been on it since. Distro hopping is fun. The issue with OpenSUSE is it's huge unless you do a minimalist install. yast is a great tool, however. Debian should have something like this. I agree zypper is a nice package manager, and it's fast.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#105
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fedora chooses what Red Hat develops. And Red Hat are building their own OS, with a lot less of the modularity and customisation that has historically been possible in Linux.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#106
post #20

This could be a great opportunity for someone looking to step into a leadership role.

It is not: https://danielpocock.com/what-does-democracy-mean-in-free-so... The current Debian "developers" have reached uniform agreed that: 1) Neither of them will participate in election 2) People outside of "developer" circle (including major contributors, who do most of actual work on Debian) can't participate in election The whole "crisis" is artificially created. Not like that matters, — most of decision making…

Reading through those articles it indeed seems like a political nightmare. When you have both volunteers and paid members, politics will be inevitable, as those getting paid will do everything in their power to keep it, while those not getting paid will do everything they can to gain it. Just like in a startup, money can kill relations. Money is really the root of all evil. In any organization there will be politics, so as a leader you have to learn how to deal with it. You do not necessary need any power, as you do not lead by giving orders, you lead by showing. I think solving the inequity problem would be a top priority, maybe dedicate 50% of your own FAANG salary and give it to people that do the same job as you do, but doesn't get paid. It's probably a really bad idea, but it's just an example, the purpose is that others will follow.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#107
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never understood the pure love for apt. Ports/pkg is better. Gentoo’s package manager is better. Even yast was better (imho). Once I needed a package from an external repository, apt has almost always fallen down into a pit of duplicate and incompatible dependencies. Maybe it’s better now, but I was burned long ago and never looked back.

> Ports/pkg is better. Gentoo’s package manager is better. Strongly agree. Gentoo's Portage is the best experience I've had with a package manager on Linux. My package management observations, as someone who's been using them for... a while, now. Best experiences: Portage on Gentoo (lots of options; many packages; fast; reliable unless I broke it doing something stupid; maintaining a high level of control over the sy…

Portage and OpenRC are the two reasons that I keep Gentoo as my daily.

I try about 1-2 other distros every year (in VMs or a spare laptop), and I always stay with Gentoo. I won't go so far as to say that it's objectively better, but after 10 years or so just nothing else compares for me.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Debian? It values freedom: A) of software - DFSG B) of decisionmaking - Debian constitution C) of choice Stemming from that, there are the following advantages I value (opinion ahead): * both installed program and source is just an apt command away (A, C) * has a large repository of software (historically largest; nowadays it's still among the largest) (A, C) * security support for stable release for the whole ar…

True community distro is what I was going to say as well. I view Debian as 'plain old linux.' My fear though, is Debian is not going to be able to keep up with the pace of commercial linux distributions. Things are moving at light speed these days.

Not keep up in what way? Package version freshness? Relatively recent kernels?

Re: Leaderless Debian

#109
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yum has been around for so long that I really can’t believe people still bring this up. Even a decade after yum came around, I still heard Debian people comparing “rpm” vs “apt”, which is a completely apples to oranges comparison. I can only assume that those Debian people were so out of touch with other distros that their opinions could not be trusted.

Yum has been largely replaced by dnf, which is far and away better. Despite being a Debian/Slackware fan since 1998, I do find dnf quite nice. It's still a fair bit slower than apt or pacman, but it's clean and easy to use. Slackware actually has package management systems, but I encourage people to learn how to do things the old school way so they can learn Linux. If you know Slackware, you understand how Linux trul…

Yes, but my point is that Debian people always seem to cite “rpm hell” with regard to manually tracking down rpm dependencies, while ignoring the fact that that hasn’t been a problem for decades.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#110

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…

> In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in enterprise

Not going to rephrase what others have said but wanted to add a funny piece of anecdote: Long time ago when I worked for telcos many customers required a RedHat professional license for any piece of infrastructure running Linux. We therefore used to license one RedHat server for each of the deployed server running Debian :-p

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