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Leaderless Debian

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Re: Leaderless Debian

#41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum. If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt. In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

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.

I haven't had a problem with apt since I was using Debian Unstable (sid) back in 2005... and even then, I think I installed stuff from other repos that conflicted with the base system.

Portage is cute but it's tied to Gentoo and few people want to compile their own packages.

Apt was one of the earliest package managers for Linux, for a popular distribution. That was enough to give it a head start regarding packages available. And that's all you need, unless the other solutions are obviously superior from the user perspective, which they're not.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#42
post #33

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…

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum. If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt. In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

So I've heard this before, and I really want to know what are the things that make apt better? The only thing I can see is that yum was pretty slow (dnf seems to be marginally better). Otherwise, the rpm package format seems pretty on par with deb and apt seems like a super crusty interface with multiple commands and stuff.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#43
post #33

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…

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum. If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt. In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

I upvoted you. Yes, APT was the major reason I chose Debian 15 years ago. It was much better than RPM without YUM (it wasn't part of RH systems back then IIRC).

Nowadays the competitive edge of APT could have diminished, but I never looked else where because I have been quite happy with APT.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#44

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…

This is anecdotal, but a trend I am hearing from companies in the cloud hosting sector is that because Ubuntu has been a stronger desktop OS (better at "just works" out of the box, particularly on laptops), developers who use it for their desktop then choose to use it instead of RHEL for servers when they are deploying in their enterprise jobs (use what you know). The result is a rapidly growing usage of Ubuntu for enterprise servers. RHEL is still dominant, but the usage of Ubuntu is significant and continuing to grow quickly.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#46
I am switching to Devuan which is Debian without the service manager known as systemd (not trying to flame about systemd but it is no longer my preference) .

So far it has worked great for me on my test laptop and I will be rolling out some VM's shortly.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum. If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt. In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat > Debian.

So I've heard this before, and I really want to know what are the things that make apt better? The only thing I can see is that yum was pretty slow (dnf seems to be marginally better). Otherwise, the rpm package format seems pretty on par with deb and apt seems like a super crusty interface with multiple commands and stuff.

Debian had a much more rigorous packaging policy than Red Hat/Fedora Core early on (the same policy that slows down development and annoys developers today, as you can see in the various recent HN threads) and way more packages in the main repos.

Using RH easily led you into an "rpm hell" of packages from various third-party repos that conflicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell#Platform-speci...

Now they're both comparable. Yum/dnf are ok, the rpm repos are big. And apt actually has "apt", the tool, that consolidates those separate tools you mention. Before it had aptitude (since at least 2006 or so, I'd say) but it wasn't used much, but now apt is installed by default and you can use it. No more "apt-get", "apt-cache", etc.

So today, nothing makes one of them substantially better, IMO.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#48

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…

I know of at least two FAANGs that base their internal Linux distros off of Debian. If you want an enterprise OS with certifications and a friendly embrace from IBM, why not just use Windows?

Re: Leaderless Debian

#49
post #6
post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

Amazon has Amazon Linux which is based on CentOS, and Google has invested in CoreOS which also based on CentOS just for K8s. I don't know if other vendors like DO would invest in any specific distro tbh.

Additional data point: The Linux that runs Google corp Linux machines is a debian derivative:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux

Re: Leaderless Debian

#50

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…

I know of at least two FAANGs that base their internal Linux distros off of Debian. If you want an enterprise OS with certifications and a friendly embrace from IBM, why not just use Windows?

> If you want an enterprise OS with certifications and a friendly embrace from IBM, why not just use Windows?

The accidental (?) irony in this is just awesome :)

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...

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