Debian is by far my favorite linux distribution, but it's not without its faults.
Debian tends to soft- and hard-hijack package names. Normally, having a maintainer between upstream and users is a good thing. What's not a good thing is them misrepresenting modified upstream software to users. This can mislead users (See ffmpeg, keepassxc). Fortunately, the mozilla approach of using trademark law to stop others from misrepresenting software is effective here.
Debian also doesn't offer a clear lifecycle schedule like ubuntu and other enterprisy distros. This makes it hard to plan ahead long term and forces admins to manually check support status.
Debian stable is released roughly every 2 years. Once a release becomes oldstable, it gets LTS [0] support for at least 5 years, and Extended LTS [1] for another 5.
I think Debian is one of the easiest distros to plan ahead for.
Just an FYI for those reading. I had no idea what the keepassxc thing is about - apparently the debian version doesn't have a bunch of functionality that the original version has, and this was the maintainer's decision.
I bought a laptop in a pawnshop about five months ago, and I tried Linux Mint, Ubuntu fedora, Manjaro, and another arch distribution I can’t remember, and they were all just a big clunky pain in the butt.
And then there was Debian. It’s been running flawlessly for four months. All function over flash. I don’t need to worry about snap or flatpak or configurations that caused me to have to search the Internet for hours.
I love Debian too, but what you described was demonstrably false back when they didn’t include non-free firmware on the installation media. Honestly I think this might be one of the reasons Ubuntu got popular back in the day to begin with, because it was Debian that “just worked”. These days I’m finding it very hard to come up with legitimate reasons to run Ubuntu over Debian.
> I think this might be one of the reasons Ubuntu got popular back in the day
That's absolutely one of the big reasons. I've been a Debian user since slink/potato.
When Ubuntu first came out, it was still heavily Debian rebranded, with some newer packages, and better out-of-the-box driver support. I would some times choose it over Debian because of that. In time, Debian became more compatible and Ubuntu drifted out into what feels like VC-led product development.
It's kind of sad how these days a lot of people default to Ubuntu even though Debian would likely serve them better.
Actually, with the laptop I bought the new installerwas actually kind of more of a pain in the butt. For some reason I could load the live CD fine but if I tried to do a network install I could not get the firmware to load it all. Even on an external USB.
> I think that Debian is the last step in the Linux user lifecycle, and that once a user comes to it at the right time, and for the right reasons, it will be their Linux home thereafter.
No that's FreeBSD.
RPM hell drove me from RH to FreeBSD in 1999 and I only go back when forced.
If it hadn't been for all the copyright nonsense there would never have been a need for Linux.
Debian is fine if Linux is the only option but better in a bhyve VM or linuxemu jail.
Hello, BSD fellow! I have fond memories of it from 4.11 to 7 eras. Sadly desktop never really happened to unixlikes to the extent I could be satisfied with, and vps options were limited to ubuntu and few others, so I had to move on. But FreeBSD was a greater experience nonetheless.
Very fond memories of those days for sure. In my job back then I was a C developer working on IRIX day to day. I had heard about FreeBSD so bought a walnut creek book with a FreeBSD 3.4 CD and started from there. I still have the book but the CD is long gone.
The FreeBSD aesthetic, documentation, code base, are so clean and well written, and most important -- the adherence to the principle of least surprise, particularly across releases. This is a complaint I have with many Linux distros.
The one piece missing for a FreeBSD user is how this article points out that Debian can easily run commercial software distributed with .deb files.
FreeBSD has the major disadvantage of being even more niche than Linux. Debian doesn’t have that problem because it’s so similar to the most mainstream flavors of open source operating systems.
RPM hell drove me from RH to Debian around the same time and it was such bliss that I stayed with it for many many years. These days I tend to use Ubuntu or Arch when I feel like I have the time to spare.
I just want Debian but with a system whereby system packages are not restricting me just apt-get installing a more modern version of Python because "it could break everything", then run it under a different environment? Let me run user-space apt apps with a different environment and paths to link against.
I want sane bleeding edge, but I dont want to waste hours and days fixing some source distro up just to get wifi working or GPU drivers.
For me, my best approximation of "sane bleeding edge" is between Fedora and Arch, each with pros and cons. The thing I love so much about Arch and what I believe is an extremely underrated feature of rolling release distros is that everyone is on the exact same page. There is only one supported version of everything, and that's what's currently in the repos. If something breaks you can go on the forum or the subreddit or whatever and there will be someone else with your problem and someone probably already has a workaround.
Sounds kinda cursed, but running something like Debian sid sucks because there's not many other people doing that. Meanwhile with Arch, there's plenty of people doing all sorts of wacky things, the wiki is really good, and the AUR hugely lowers the burden of random things you installed that weren't provided in repos that you have to remember how to build and update every once in a while.
None of this is relevant to your Python example though.
> Sounds kinda cursed, but running something like Debian sid sucks because there's not many other people doing that.
I am not sure that is correct. I think it is very common for (experienced) people that run Debian to use Debian Testing or Debian Unstable on the desktop and Debian Stable on servers.
Personally, I run Debian Testing with selected packages from Unstable. I rarely have problems with that setup.
This request pattern matches "I just want Debian but [specific software should be bleeding edge]". I don't think that is a request that can be reasonably satisfied since the logical conclusion is a distro where every package is bleeding edge. Maybe containers or somesuch could work?
Python is a particularly gnarly one. The Python community are a lovely crew but they have no particular respect for people who like stability. The 2->3 transition on Debian was unpleasant and I don't think that was because of the Debain maintainers.
This kind of mindset is leading to a lot of work on distros with an immutable core, so your base system is solid but everything else can be whatever you want it to be.
This only applies to desktop apps, but Flatpak does an incredible job of this, making it easy to get the bleeding edge version of some app without your underlying system being bothered by it.
AppImages can help solve this problem for GUI and non-GUI apps alike, but they're not centralised in a nice repo and you have the Windows problem where you have 50 programs bundling the same libraries over and over.
Run Debian Stable and install Flatpak. This provides exactly that kind of „different environment“ where bleeding edge software won’t break your system. (Of course, not everything is available as a flatpak. But hopefully that will improve in the future.)
Yeah, Debian was designed for the old-school multi-user days where a system was maintained by a dedicated sysadmin. Ultimately linux people will be dragged kicking and screaming onto something with sane library management like NixOS (or else something Snap/Flatpak-based, but I hope not), but it hasn't happened yet.
If I had the time, energy and funds I'd try some mix of Ubuntu (driver supports always been really good OOTB with Ubuntu for me) with something like NixOS package management maybe. I just prefer my distro to be decent OOTB instead of me hacking up solutions.
Well you've got to get it. Google is running on a 2.x Linux kernel, with thousands of patches. The hypervisor runs on bare-metal, and it's not "debian". You need to start thinking about debian as just another virtual system and get with the program. If you're installing an operating system on bare metal, and it's not a bsd with jails, you may be doing it wrong. Or, maybe you have an offline developer's environment bare-metal install, debian, arch, whatever, a linux efistub is enough, and then host a passed thru network vm, in a container, with strong guest to host protections. You do you?
I tend to mostly agree with this, having spent years with Arch and Gentoo on my personal machines. I like Debian and usually default to it for containers, servers, and VMs.
My desktop and laptop run NixOS though, primarily because it gives me access to one of the largest package repositories with up to date packages AND makes it effortless to rollback if/when I break things. This was my primary issue with Arch, where I’d have to be cautious about what I was upgrading and when. With NixOS I’m generally pretty reckless because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state.
What command would that be? The only way I would know to fix a broken Arch box is to manually fix whatever went wrong, not reboot -> select the previous generation in the bootloader -> done.
I run Debian on my base machine and use Nix for all my user space tools. I think it’s the best of both worlds. I get nix for all my config management, but a normal stable distro underneath as a fallback.
Yep, also an underrated path! I had RHEL with nix briefly, so you got the support and stability of RHEL with the latest tools and packages from nixpkgs if you needed them.
I've been telling others much the same, but additionally:
- You can see debian's maturity even in the ARM landscape. Out of all the distros that are compiled for ARM64, I could only get 2 (debian and opensuse) to run in the context of a standard VM. I think it's that others are targeted to SBCs rather than UEFI or something, but as apple and qualcomm grow into the traditional laptop space, this matters, and only debian & opensuse showed up to the party.
- I'm lazy and value changing as little as possible, but if I ever need to move configurations around or my computer explodes and I need a fresh start... I can see the value in NIX / GUIX. As nix can sit atop debian, perhaps this is an end goal for some.
- Also, getting overwhelmed by complexity as my time to spend on configuration decreases, I find FreeBSD's interactions pleasant and refreshing.
- I like what I see of Alpine's commitment to smaller, less complex foundations. Perhaps this deserves attention too.
So I guess I'm saying, absolutely yes to debian, but don't forget about nix, guix, alpine, and freebsd.
I started out with Ubuntu over 15 years ago and use Ubuntu to this day, likely will when I'm in a retirement home, simply because it ships with codecs and the most usable default desktop environment out of the box. (who decided to remove tray icons from Gnome?).
>They will realize that of the big three, only Debian is truly community controlled
This is the kind of thing I don't understand at all, literally every linux distro is 100% 'me' controlled, I can run `rm -rf /` if I feel like it. That's the good thing about open systems, I can remove snaps if I don't like them and Mark Shuttleworth isn't going to jump out of the bushes to get me.
I wouldn’t mind a Bondo for the most part if they stopped using snap packages. There are two applications I installed and it would not let me browse files from the application. I found out after hours of searching that was some configuration I had to change, but that didn’t even seem to work.
It's not so much that you can't do it, as that if you want to e.g. extricate snap from Ubuntu, now you have to do work whereas Debian is good enough to not come with it.
Readit News
Debian tends to soft- and hard-hijack package names. Normally, having a maintainer between upstream and users is a good thing. What's not a good thing is them misrepresenting modified upstream software to users. This can mislead users (See ffmpeg, keepassxc). Fortunately, the mozilla approach of using trademark law to stop others from misrepresenting software is effective here.
Debian also doesn't offer a clear lifecycle schedule like ubuntu and other enterprisy distros. This makes it hard to plan ahead long term and forces admins to manually check support status.
Debian stable is released roughly every 2 years. Once a release becomes oldstable, it gets LTS [0] support for at least 5 years, and Extended LTS [1] for another 5.
I think Debian is one of the easiest distros to plan ahead for.
[0] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS [1] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
https://fosstodon.org/@keepassxc/112417353193348720
I bought a laptop in a pawnshop about five months ago, and I tried Linux Mint, Ubuntu fedora, Manjaro, and another arch distribution I can’t remember, and they were all just a big clunky pain in the butt.
And then there was Debian. It’s been running flawlessly for four months. All function over flash. I don’t need to worry about snap or flatpak or configurations that caused me to have to search the Internet for hours.
Love it.
That's absolutely one of the big reasons. I've been a Debian user since slink/potato.
When Ubuntu first came out, it was still heavily Debian rebranded, with some newer packages, and better out-of-the-box driver support. I would some times choose it over Debian because of that. In time, Debian became more compatible and Ubuntu drifted out into what feels like VC-led product development.
It's kind of sad how these days a lot of people default to Ubuntu even though Debian would likely serve them better.
No that's FreeBSD.
RPM hell drove me from RH to FreeBSD in 1999 and I only go back when forced.
If it hadn't been for all the copyright nonsense there would never have been a need for Linux.
Debian is fine if Linux is the only option but better in a bhyve VM or linuxemu jail.
The FreeBSD aesthetic, documentation, code base, are so clean and well written, and most important -- the adherence to the principle of least surprise, particularly across releases. This is a complaint I have with many Linux distros.
FreeBSD has the major disadvantage of being even more niche than Linux. Debian doesn’t have that problem because it’s so similar to the most mainstream flavors of open source operating systems.
Well, that and if 386BSD shipped about a year earlier...
I want sane bleeding edge, but I dont want to waste hours and days fixing some source distro up just to get wifi working or GPU drivers.
Sounds kinda cursed, but running something like Debian sid sucks because there's not many other people doing that. Meanwhile with Arch, there's plenty of people doing all sorts of wacky things, the wiki is really good, and the AUR hugely lowers the burden of random things you installed that weren't provided in repos that you have to remember how to build and update every once in a while.
None of this is relevant to your Python example though.
I am not sure that is correct. I think it is very common for (experienced) people that run Debian to use Debian Testing or Debian Unstable on the desktop and Debian Stable on servers.
Personally, I run Debian Testing with selected packages from Unstable. I rarely have problems with that setup.
Python is a particularly gnarly one. The Python community are a lovely crew but they have no particular respect for people who like stability. The 2->3 transition on Debian was unpleasant and I don't think that was because of the Debain maintainers.
This only applies to desktop apps, but Flatpak does an incredible job of this, making it easy to get the bleeding edge version of some app without your underlying system being bothered by it.
AppImages can help solve this problem for GUI and non-GUI apps alike, but they're not centralised in a nice repo and you have the Windows problem where you have 50 programs bundling the same libraries over and over.
On the other hand, you might want to install Guix and/or Nix on top of Debian.
My desktop and laptop run NixOS though, primarily because it gives me access to one of the largest package repositories with up to date packages AND makes it effortless to rollback if/when I break things. This was my primary issue with Arch, where I’d have to be cautious about what I was upgrading and when. With NixOS I’m generally pretty reckless because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state.
After a decade with arch as my primary OS, I can say the same.
I know plenty of folks have claimed issues with upgrades, maybe I'm lucky with the variety of hardware I've used.
I dream of the day I start using nix to build my work stuff, but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.
- You can see debian's maturity even in the ARM landscape. Out of all the distros that are compiled for ARM64, I could only get 2 (debian and opensuse) to run in the context of a standard VM. I think it's that others are targeted to SBCs rather than UEFI or something, but as apple and qualcomm grow into the traditional laptop space, this matters, and only debian & opensuse showed up to the party.
- I'm lazy and value changing as little as possible, but if I ever need to move configurations around or my computer explodes and I need a fresh start... I can see the value in NIX / GUIX. As nix can sit atop debian, perhaps this is an end goal for some.
- Also, getting overwhelmed by complexity as my time to spend on configuration decreases, I find FreeBSD's interactions pleasant and refreshing.
- I like what I see of Alpine's commitment to smaller, less complex foundations. Perhaps this deserves attention too.
So I guess I'm saying, absolutely yes to debian, but don't forget about nix, guix, alpine, and freebsd.
Maybe there's a better distribution? But who has time to explore?
Thanks Debian team!
>They will realize that of the big three, only Debian is truly community controlled
This is the kind of thing I don't understand at all, literally every linux distro is 100% 'me' controlled, I can run `rm -rf /` if I feel like it. That's the good thing about open systems, I can remove snaps if I don't like them and Mark Shuttleworth isn't going to jump out of the bushes to get me.