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Debian 13 “Trixie”

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221–230 of 428 posts

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#221

Writing this from my Debian system, it's a great distro that has been excellent to me as a daily driver. I switched to Debian 6 after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it. I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I lik…

> And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.

You're not trying hard enough ;-)

I have Debian on an old MacBook Pro and had it on an even older iMac, and I've had a few problems over the years. Always with proprietary drivers - WiFi, graphics, webcams, etc. - Apple really don't want people using free software on their hardware. There's always been a fix, but there have been a few stressful moments and hoops to jump through.

But it's definitely my favorite distro, and I run it everywhere I can. Pretty much always "just works" anywhere but Apple.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what end? Outside of sheer nostalgia if you are running ancient hardware, you probably have a bespoke application which requires that environment. Either you cannot change for hard technical, compliance, or just fear of the unknown. Firewall it from the internet and continue to run whatever release last worked. I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less ho…

My Linux machine is very modern, but I still need i386 architecture support installed, because Steam requires 32-bit support. And Steam requires 32-bit support so people can play 15-year-old games. (Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine these days)

Debian is doing basically the same thing Ubuntu is with regards to i386. Packages are still being built for the architecture, but i386 systems aren't supported, and there's no 32-bit kernel package.

e.g. notice that i386 is still listed at the bottom of https://packages.debian.org/trixie/bash

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.

As I understand it, snap the package format is not proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they patch their version of snap to only use that store. It'd be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub. Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".

> If I try to manipulate what you are talking about, I can attempt to frame something as open source which isn't.

I didn't say "the snap format".

The server isn't, and the client is hostile to using an alternative server. Snaps are a solution, and picking out one piece is deceptive.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#224
post #137

A new APT sources format "debian.sources" is announced with trixie. The now older "sources.list" format is still supported, but is likely to be deprecated in a future Debian release. See below: APT is moving to a different format for configuring where it downloads packages from. The files /etc/apt/sources.list and *.list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ are replaced by files still in that directory but with names en…

Ooh, that's nice. Especially nice that it lets you specify both Suites: and Components: in the same stanza, so you don't have to repeat the rest of the line to add -updates and -backports suites.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#225
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you confusing "386" with 32bit? 686 is the normal 32bit arch. 386 is something from the 1980's right?

When distros mention i386 support they often actually refer to i586 or i686, yes. True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run on regular Pentiums today if compiled fo…

Debian 3.0 was the last version that ran on the 80386 processor proper, but even as the CPU requirements for the "i386" architecture moved up to the 486, then Pentium, then Pentium II, the name stuck around. Partly from inertia, partly to not break the entire existing mirror infrastructure.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, snap the package format is not proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they patch their version of snap to only use that store. It'd be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub. Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".

I've tried making snap packages, but I discovered they're very tightly tied to Ubuntu's base packages. They're not portable at all. In essence they're effectively just a secondary Ubuntu-specific package format for user-level applications. For example, with flatpak you select a base runtime for your package that contains mostly system-agnostic libraries. With snap, you specify an Ubuntu version as a base runtime and…

My understanding is that the base layer (similar to what FlatPak provides) is shared and downloaded by the snap manager so it is portable as long as you want to download it.

The end result should be similar to FlatPak where you have practically no dependencies as it should package almost everything.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#228

I see that systemd is still doing this thing where they are trying to strong-arm all Linux distros into arbitrary stuff that someone decided is the only right way to do something: > 5.2.2. systemd message: System is tainted: unmerged-bin systemd upstream, since version 256, considers systems having separate /usr/bin and /usr/sbin directories noteworthy. At startup systemd emits a message to record this fact: System…

You may not like it, but “arbitrary” isn’t a fair description; there’s reasoning behind it that is over 10 years old:

http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor...

That said, my knee-jerk is also that this is about strong-arming distros. Which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’d be interested to hear other viewpoints though.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#229
post #228

I see that systemd is still doing this thing where they are trying to strong-arm all Linux distros into arbitrary stuff that someone decided is the only right way to do something: > 5.2.2. systemd message: System is tainted: unmerged-bin systemd upstream, since version 256, considers systems having separate /usr/bin and /usr/sbin directories noteworthy. At startup systemd emits a message to record this fact: System…

You may not like it, but “arbitrary” isn’t a fair description; there’s reasoning behind it that is over 10 years old: http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor... That said, my knee-jerk is also that this is about strong-arming distros. Which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’d be interested to hear other viewpoints though.

Note that this is about a different thing - Debian has also merged its /bin into /usr/bin, but now systemd also wants /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to be merged.

Re: Debian 13 “Trixie”

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free Assuming you are not malicious I will kindly help with your bad memory, Ubuntu had always very good proprietary driver support, this made laptops actually work and helped beginners. I also remember they had a graphical installer compared to Debian and for sure this was beginners friendly. Maybe some other distro offered easy way to install and…

the graphical installer was debian's new experimental installer. They just decided to release a stable distro before debian with it. Proprietary driver installation was the sole reason of existence of Linux Mint which was a fork of ubuntu, so your memory is incorrect.

>Proprietary driver installation was the sole reason of existence of Linux Mint which was a fork of ubuntu, so your memory is incorrect.

I think your memory is incorrect, you might be thinking of video codecs and maybe Flash not proprietary drivers, since Ubuntu already had support for easy install of drivers before Mint.

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