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Why is Debian the way it is?

312 pointsby brycewrayover 1 year ago

18 comments

rlpbover 1 year ago
&quot;Self-contained&quot; and &quot;No bundled libraries&quot; are two very important concepts that a subset of our ecosystem decided was too much work. Then they re-discovered all the problems that result, and have now coined terms like &quot;software supply chain&quot; to describe them.<p>Meanwhile Debian doesn&#x27;t suffer from any of this because it&#x27;s been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.
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talkingtabover 1 year ago
Several open source software organizations are remarkable. Not little remarkable, big remarkable. As in they show us how alternative models to the typical corporate business model may well be far superior as a way for people to collaborate. For the most part these remarkable are unknown. I have used Debian for (ahem) a very long time without knowing much about the organization and this article was a very good introduction.<p>I have been aware of the IETF for quite a while. What is most amazing is that the internet today was built (more-or-less) by the IETF. See The Tao of IETF (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;participate&#x2F;tao&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;participate&#x2F;tao&#x2F;</a>). This is an organization with no members. It just works. Hardly anyone really knows about it.<p>Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protocol_Wars" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protocol_Wars</a>). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.509.<p>The question that comes to my mind is whether these kind of democratic type collaborative organizations are in fact superior (far superior?) to the traditional corporate model. I personally have watched many corporations act with obvious stupidity. Doing things that can only be described as severely fight-their-way-out-of-a-paper-bag challenged. To put it kindly.<p>Certainly these other-style organizations do not really stack up on an economic basis. The income of most corporations dwarfs that of both the IETF and Debian. And yet as a contributor and creator, I can ask Cuo Bono? Certainly not the contributors, they subsist.<p>And perhaps most interesting to me, and perhaps worth an experiment, is whether it is possible to use an IETF or Debian style model that competes with the corporate model. It did work once with the Protocol Wars, so maybe.<p>(edit to remove markdown syntax, sigh)
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chubotover 1 year ago
I just switched to Debian this year after ~13 years of Ubuntu, and I really appreciate it<p>It grew on me after a long time. I always thought it was not the most &quot;technically sound&quot; way of doing things<p>i.e. I don&#x27;t really like the packaging model of global updates where you don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on, and sometimes there are version conflicts<p>But I have come to appreciate the stability and good intentions of the Debian project<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s not technical excellence that matters the most, but the purpose and goals of the project
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dsr_over 1 year ago
LIW left out one major chunk: because Debian is a volunteer organization, and nobody can make a volunteer do anything that they don&#x27;t want to do.
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larmeover 1 year ago
Sometimes I daydream about getting a fuck-it amount of money.<p>During this thought process I always make a plan of what open source software project I should donate, and debian is always one of the first several candidates.<p>Now I just need the money! (meanwhile I donate to debian anyway)
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talent_deprivedover 1 year ago
Debian could be great except for driver support which they only tacitly acknowledge:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;debian&#x2F;comments&#x2F;paxj85&#x2F;why_debian_with_proprietary_drivers_is_not&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;debian&#x2F;comments&#x2F;paxj85&#x2F;why_debian_w...</a><p>&quot;We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don&#x27;t conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created &quot;contrib&quot; and &quot;non-free&quot; areas in our FTP archive for this software.&quot;<p>I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.
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FuriouslyAdriftover 1 year ago
I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries.<p>The guy truly believed in the GNU&#x2F;Linux &#x27;way&#x27; and &#x27;free as in speech&#x27; software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructure) was his passion that he really never quite got going.<p>Bruce Perens, the guy he handed control over to, is the authoritarian leader being refered to. I like the guy. He&#x27;s definitely in the old guard, aka Linus Torvalds, style of management. In big complex projects with volunteers that syle works.<p>Anyways, the old days of Linux and Debian were a blast. I never quite go tinto like all these other people, but I miss those old days.<p>There&#x27;s way too much money people involved today. So it goes.<p>Ian&#x27;s manifesto explains it all, anyways.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debian.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;project-history&#x2F;manifesto.en.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.debian.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;project-history&#x2F;manifesto...</a>
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happytigerover 1 year ago
Debian is Toyota. Reliable but boring. Except it’s also built by volunteers.
Dweditover 1 year ago
Debian&#x27;s policies also led to a heavily restricted version of RetroArch being available instead of the real version. Specifically, RetroArch has its own package management functionality built-in through its &quot;Core Updater&quot; feature, which downloads and installs emulators in the form of library files. This is banned by Debian because it sidesteps the whole package manager system.<p>Meanwhile, you can still build the full version of RetroArch from source code by installing the dependencies of Debian&#x27;s source package, but building the original source code instead.
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arun-mani-jover 1 year ago
I personally love and use Debian exactly for its principles and stability.<p>I have heard users of other distros and a few upstream complaint that Debian &quot;modifies&quot; their packages?<p>Is it so? If yes, there surely must be a good reason. Can someone tell me about it?
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cswhnjiddover 1 year ago
TIL Debian is mostly packaging.<p>Love it, Debian is amazing.
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FpUserover 1 year ago
&gt;&quot;Self-contained&quot;<p>I love that whole paragraph. And in general prefer their philosophy.
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fsfloverover 1 year ago
&gt; what was “free software” was defined by the Free Software Foundation, but in a way that left much to be interpreted<p>I don&#x27;t understand what the author means here. What is unclear about the four freedoms? To me, Debian&#x27;s definition looks redundant.
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aiunboxedover 1 year ago
&gt; The historic background for this is that the first Debian project leaders were implicitly all-powerful dictators until they chose to step down<p>What was this about ?
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barumrhoover 1 year ago
I used to choose other distros for more updated dependencies, but now I appreciate the stability at OS level a lot more. Containers also solves the problem for running services.
klysmover 1 year ago
I think the next generation of immutable distros is going to eventually make Debian effectively obsolete for many service workloads.
codedokodeover 1 year ago
What I don&#x27;t like in Debian:<p>- 3rd-party software is not welcome; there is no mechanism for installing it securely because you are supposed to either install software from official repository or compile what you have written yourself. For example, if you want to install Sublime Text, or VS Code, there is no way to do it securely, without giving untrusted software access to your browser history and SSH keys. Of course, you can ignore security and run sudo curl <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;script" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;script</a> , but it doesn&#x27;t guarantee that the installer won&#x27;t break something. It is like we are back in 95 when every second program would replace system DLLs in Windows folder and break other software.<p>- there are third-party repositories, but they can cause conflicts and you better not use them, but there is no other way to install third-party software.<p>Third-party software is very important, I install OS to run it, and it surpises me that Linux is so unfriendly to third-party software, including closed-source software and doesn&#x27;t provide means to install and run it securely and reliably and without making developers adapt it to every existing distribution.<p>- their bugtracker is email-based and as I don&#x27;t use email it is completely alien to me. But maybe this is not bad because it stops most of people from posting bugs and saves time to reply to them.<p>I also tried Fedora, and here is what I don&#x27;t like:<p>- they release a new version every 6 or 12 months and it is incompatible with older version, and you have to use a very weird way to upgrade: first, you need to install non-standard plugin (dnf-plugin-system-upgrade), then you need to download packages, then reboot into a temporary OS, then if everything is ok, it will create a new OS, and reboot into it. It looks complicated, easy to break and probably requires a lot of disk space, while Debian can upgrade everything in place.<p>- if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records nor crash dumps and you will never figure out why it has crashed<p>Also, APT is buggy when dealing with mixed 32-bit&#x2F;64-bit packages: I wanted to install a package once and it suggested to delete half of the system to do it; luckily I have noticed that the package list is too long before agreeing. Why would package manager <i>delete</i> packages when I ask to <i>install</i> something, I don&#x27;t understand. As a bugtracker requires using email, I didn&#x27;t report it, and it would be difficult to reproduce this anyway.
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bfrogover 1 year ago
Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I&#x27;m alone on that gut feel.
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