desktoplinux.com— You may love Ubuntu, but the designer of the popular Linux desktop SimplyMEPIS is going back to Debian for the heart of his Linux distribution and here's why.
Jul 30, 2007View in Crawl 4
Ubuntu isn't /that/ bloated. Start-up may be slow, but it's not horribly unbearable. The only real advantage to debian is I guess stability. Start up time, like you mentioned, is pretty darn fast too. And not to mention they have /all/ the latest software, rivalling Gentoo & Sabayon.But Woodford's really a dumbass for thinking new stuff would be introduced in Ubuntu LTS releases... That and the fact that his distro blows; it's big, (Even the "lite" version!) it's got a price tag (10$ according to dw) for something Ubuntu & Debian give for free, and I never really noticed improvements compared to Ubuntu...
No, but Debian does have a very large group of users to test packages in both unstable and testing so that the bugs do get caught quite often. Bugs are frequently forwarded upstream, and patches for bugs from upstream are regularly cherry-picked back in to the distro to deal with those bugs. It's also got relatively stringent criteria for allowing a package to migrate to a releaseable state when compared with other distros. None of this is perfect, but Debian's QA process is widely regarded as the best that the Free Software world has to offer, and for good reason.Also, as per your second point, nothing makes the packager a complete dictator. Any decision by the maintainer may be brought before the technical committee for review, and they have the power to override any maintainer's decision on their package. In addition, all packages of any real note are team-maintained these days, from the kernel through gnome and kde. This weakens the power of the individual maintainer and gives you the benefit of not needing to convince the jerk. You can also get any other Debian developer to do a non-maintainer upload to fix really important bugs. So there's avenues available to you if you disagree with the maintainer. Again, the process isn't perfect, but it's nowhere near a "Big big big problem" any more than having Linus as lead maintainer of the kernel is a "Big big big problem".
I've had a very similar experience. LinuxPPC was my first distro so I went through the same choice :-)I've never wanted Linux to be anything but easier. I've devoted pretty much all of my time working on Free Software to actually make that a reality, albeit in small ways. So long as Linux doesn't lose its power and flexibility in the effort to become easier to deal with, I don't think anyone will complain except those newbies who are more interested in being cool than making and using something cool.
Gnome is DLL hell? WTF?It might work importing new stuff with old libs. Its not DLL Hell. It's just that most gnome-libs, kde-libs and even the linux-kernel do not have a stable binary level API. So you at least need to rebuilt each package, kernel module, etc. And even then there might be new bugs that only exist because of the combination of the newer firefox and the older libs. Most work is in the bug-fixing; keeping everything stable.
The 15+ year old init system is aging. Nobody denies that, and if you do, you need to try writing complex startup scripts. Having written an init directory from scratch for an embedded distro I worked on, I can tell you that alternative init systems have a lot to offer. Is upstart the end-all-be-all? Most likely not. Not for me anyway. But to stick with the standard init architecture or, as I presume you do, extX filesystems because of some perceived "stability" is simply foolish. Not to mention, Linux is about choice.
jorophoseJul 31, 2007
Ubuntu isn't /that/ bloated. Start-up may be slow, but it's not horribly unbearable. The only real advantage to debian is I guess stability. Start up time, like you mentioned, is pretty darn fast too. And not to mention they have /all/ the latest software, rivalling Gentoo & Sabayon.But Woodford's really a dumbass for thinking new stuff would be introduced in Ubuntu LTS releases... That and the fact that his distro blows; it's big, (Even the "lite" version!) it's got a price tag (10$ according to dw) for something Ubuntu & Debian give for free, and I never really noticed improvements compared to Ubuntu...
gravityboyJul 31, 2007
No, but Debian does have a very large group of users to test packages in both unstable and testing so that the bugs do get caught quite often. Bugs are frequently forwarded upstream, and patches for bugs from upstream are regularly cherry-picked back in to the distro to deal with those bugs. It's also got relatively stringent criteria for allowing a package to migrate to a releaseable state when compared with other distros. None of this is perfect, but Debian's QA process is widely regarded as the best that the Free Software world has to offer, and for good reason.Also, as per your second point, nothing makes the packager a complete dictator. Any decision by the maintainer may be brought before the technical committee for review, and they have the power to override any maintainer's decision on their package. In addition, all packages of any real note are team-maintained these days, from the kernel through gnome and kde. This weakens the power of the individual maintainer and gives you the benefit of not needing to convince the jerk. You can also get any other Debian developer to do a non-maintainer upload to fix really important bugs. So there's avenues available to you if you disagree with the maintainer. Again, the process isn't perfect, but it's nowhere near a "Big big big problem" any more than having Linus as lead maintainer of the kernel is a "Big big big problem".
gravityboyJul 31, 2007
I've had a very similar experience. LinuxPPC was my first distro so I went through the same choice :-)I've never wanted Linux to be anything but easier. I've devoted pretty much all of my time working on Free Software to actually make that a reality, albeit in small ways. So long as Linux doesn't lose its power and flexibility in the effort to become easier to deal with, I don't think anyone will complain except those newbies who are more interested in being cool than making and using something cool.
meneerrAug 4, 2007
Gnome is DLL hell? WTF?It might work importing new stuff with old libs. Its not DLL Hell. It's just that most gnome-libs, kde-libs and even the linux-kernel do not have a stable binary level API. So you at least need to rebuilt each package, kernel module, etc. And even then there might be new bugs that only exist because of the combination of the newer firefox and the older libs. Most work is in the bug-fixing; keeping everything stable.
drdabblesAug 7, 2007
The 15+ year old init system is aging. Nobody denies that, and if you do, you need to try writing complex startup scripts. Having written an init directory from scratch for an embedded distro I worked on, I can tell you that alternative init systems have a lot to offer. Is upstart the end-all-be-all? Most likely not. Not for me anyway. But to stick with the standard init architecture or, as I presume you do, extX filesystems because of some perceived "stability" is simply foolish. Not to mention, Linux is about choice.