21–30 of 49 posts
I would switch to a BSD if I had his troubles.
I did (for a NAS), and the learning curve (after 10+ years of Debian) is steep . I'm hoping one day I can justify the ~40 hours I've put into wrangling FreeNAS, and then FreeBSD 10 (needed the newer igb driver).
We'll get the answer in few years :)
I mean, most people don't have that many problems with Ubuntu and Debian boxes, right? My first thought is, what is the author doing that most people aren't? Maybe stop doing that?
I may end up going back to running without an initramfs, at least for VMs that are going to last for more than a day.
I mean, most people don't have that many problems with Ubuntu and Debian boxes, right? My first thought is, what is the author doing that most people aren't? Maybe stop doing that?
I mean, most people don't have that many problems with Ubuntu and Debian boxes, right? My first thought is, what is the author doing that most people aren't? Maybe stop doing that?
The Intel video driver likes to freeze occasionally on Debian 8 when it was never an issue on 7. Can't exactly stop "doing" X.
The page background makes it difficult to even read the article.
I will say it is awfully annoying to have the Ubuntu boot process freeze because some USB external hard drive didn't initialize it time. Just skip it for god sakes, don't make me have to find a keyboard plug it into the machine just to press S to skip mounting and boot.
A brand new Debian install on an SSD with UEFI can get me to the desktop in about 4 seconds. Please keep it that way.
The problem with traditional distributions today is that the packaging gives you something, but you are expected (particularly on a server) to take that packaging and then modify your system configuration to suit.
Unfortunately, it's then impossible for the packaging to cover every case on upgrade, since packaging can't possibly know what you did. Suddenly upgrade path code has to magically cover every conceivable use case and more. This route is doomed to fail.
Distributions are working on this problem, but it requires a huge paradigm shift that will leave behind traditionalists kicking and screaming. Take Ubuntu Snappy, for example, with its read-only filesystem and image-based updates. But this sort of thing is the only sensible way forward if you want upgrades to work without failure.
Alternatively, as a user you can take a different course. Make your deployment "immutable", and manage any necessary state independently. In other words, define your deployment as a delta to be applied over the distribution default. If things go wrong, don't try to recover; instead blow it away and redeploy. Manage your delta in version control, and make it easy to test and deploy. This is what the configuration management crowd are doing, as well as the Docker crowd, and just about everyone else.
Of course, this is a little crazy on a desktop system, which is why Ubuntu is doing Snappy.
Or, stick to doing things the traditional way, but don't expect your experience to change.