The Debian Experience

archman-cro · 2010-07-27 09:12:45

I've tried ubuntu, been on it for 3 years, and I know what you think with "not-matching package version". And I don't wanna go back. Ever.

Spip · 2010-07-29 14:49:23

I left few months ago Mandriva (since the last troubles they encountered and the absence of communication). Then, I decided to use two linux distributions.

Archlinux on my netbook. I already tried Arch many times, but not as a daily OS.

However, in my view, Arch could not fit my usage. One of my computer is for working purpose at my lab. (I'm a PhD in Physics, the os should remain stable for 3 years). The other one is for my father who uses his laptop only to go on the internet and check out his emails (In case of trouble, I only have a ssh access). I don't want for them a plenty of updates every weeks and increase in the mean time the risk of breakage. I installed a Debian stable and added icedove-iceweasel from testing repositories (thunderbird 2 is a little rusty). We cannot expect more of a mixed system (stable/testing), if you try to add vlc testing, half of the system is updated to the testing version and you lost the advantage to have stable bedrock and recent user softwares.

Of all I experienced, pacman and aptitude are both extremely powerful (compared to Mandriva tools it's not a surprise ). Debian has a king of rigidity, but I was able to deal with it for my purpose.

Vamp898 · 2010-07-29 14:56:39

To say the truth. On a Desktop i ever would use Ubuntu over Debian. They often have newer packages and 10.04 LTS is supported for 3 years (where testing/unstable/experimental of debian isn´t supported at all)

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-30 16:50:39

My experience with Debian has been... kind of strange.

Stable is very stable. It's also pretty dated by now, and incompatible with a lot of hardware.

Unstable is usable, but kind of buggy.

Testing on the other hand had a LOT of totally broken stuff in it last I checked, worse than unstable.

Also, all of the repositories are very slow, none more than 100 KB/s where I am. Granted, Arch's repos are also slow, but Arch has powerpill.

In general, I'd recommend Stable - well, Lenny anyway - for seasoned Linux geeks with old hardware. I wouldn't recommend Unstable, and I'd only recommend Testing if you want to deal with breakage all the time.

Oh, and package management! The problem with apt is that it can't handle orphans right. Not aptitude, not apt-get, not deborphan. Uninstall something big and I guarantee it will leave rubbish all over the drive that orphaner and autoremove won't pick up.

(Also, there's the thing where autoremove thinks the whole system is orphaned... But then, these issues aren't unique, they occur in almost every RPM and DEB based distro. It frankly amazes me how crappy orphan handling is in so many distros, when Arch (pacman -Rscn) and BSDs (pkg_rmleaves, pkg_mgr, etc.) do it so well.)

Skripka · 2010-07-30 16:57:10

Gullible Jones wrote:

Also, all of the repositories are very slow, none more than 100 KB/s where I am. Granted, Arch's repos are also slow, but Arch has powerpill.

It depends on what Arch mirror you're using. I max out my 7megabit download speed on the mirror I use. No powerpill.

Skripka · 2010-07-30 16:58:26

Vamp898 wrote:

To say the truth. On a Desktop i ever would use Ubuntu over Debian. They often have newer packages and 10.04 LTS is supported for 3 years (where testing/unstable/experimental of debian isn´t supported at all)

The LTS releases may be "supported" but they tend to run like crap. Personal nightmare with 8.04, as well as what I've been hearing with 10.04 as well.

EDIT-how did I screw up that version number???

Last edited by Skripka (2010-07-30 22:09:30)

72linus · 2010-07-30 21:48:58

My Debian Experience has been OK overall...

My fav distro's in order are

Slackware
ARCH
Debian
Ubuntu

I just released my Debian Sid nFluxOS edition today and find it quite stable
Please also check out all the others too:)
see here
http://multidistro.com/

Vamp898 · 2010-07-30 22:22:38

I installed the 10.04 LTS Edition on a lot of Computers and until now it worked fine everywhere (i think there are about 15)

8.04 wasn´t really good, i have to say that too but until now i didn´t experienced a larger mistake and compared to Debian it was always rock stable

Intrepid · 2010-07-31 20:14:58

Vamp898 wrote:

I tried Debian for 1 year and it was sad
These "rolling" Release is just a bad joke at least. I had so much problems with "broken packages" in case of not-matching package versions.
......
try that for 100 dependencys which get broken (like on libjpeg) and you will hate debian for years.
Like the joke says, Debian is aviable in 3 Version
rusty, stale, broken

I understand what you are saying. It goes back to the versioning scheme of Debian. Fact of the matter is, with libjpeg for example, the majority of software on ANY distro was broken about a year ago. Arch's solution is to always use the latest version, which sometimes excludes older/stabler software by default (due to huge revisioning changes). Debian's solution is to have multiple versions of each lib depending on what needs it. I agree with the Debian solution, but to roll your own packages you have to be smarter about how you link your programs etc. Some things are outdated, but never anything crucial to getting your packages working.

Gullible Jones wrote:

Oh, and package management! The problem with apt is that it can't handle orphans right. Not aptitude, not apt-get, not deborphan. Uninstall something big and I guarantee it will leave rubbish all over the drive that orphaner and autoremove won't pick up.

I find your broken package problem strange, because I've been on debian testing for months now and NEVER have gotten a broken package. Only once did I have to do something similar to

 pacman -Rd package; pacman -S newpackage

in order to prevent breakage of the entire system. If you use aptitude (not apt), orphan handling in Debian appears to be much better than Ubuntu. I've never had a problem with removing orphans, and I've uninstalled whole desktop environments (like KDE).

Last edited by Intrepid (2010-07-31 20:16:45)

Skripka · 2010-07-31 20:33:41

Intrepid wrote:

I understand what you are saying. It goes back to the versioning scheme of Debian. Fact of the matter is, with libjpeg for example, the majority of software on ANY distro was broken about a year ago. Arch's solution is to always use the latest version, which sometimes excludes older/stabler software by default (due to huge revisioning changes).

It really depends on what you mean by "stable". There also of course is far more going on here.

Arch tends to package fresh software things as vanilla as possible, shunning patches unless absolutely necessary.

vs.

Debian which needs two years to patch something to call it "stable", as they patch one thing--and 10 other things break...and after lots and lots of work they patch 1000s of packages enough to finally get them working smoothly ...at which point said software is usually severely outdated

Gullible Jones · 2010-07-31 20:59:11

Intrepid wrote:

I find your broken package problem strange, because I've been on debian testing for months now and NEVER have gotten a broken package. Only once did I have to do something similar to
 pacman -Rd package; pacman -S newpackage 
in order to prevent breakage of the entire system. If you use aptitude (not apt), orphan handling in Debian appears to be much better than Ubuntu. I've never had a problem with removing orphans, and I've uninstalled whole desktop environments (like KDE).

It's not a question of breakage, so much as leaving packages that aren't needed any more strewn about one's hard drive. With modern 100+ GB hard drives it's not a big deal, but it still bugs me that they can't make their package manager do stuff right. I mean, pacman does, BSD's package tools do... what's the big deal?

Skripka wrote:

Debian which needs two years to patch something to call it "stable", as they patch one thing--and 10 other things break...and after lots and lots of work they patch 1000s of packages enough to finally get them working smoothly ...at which point said software is usually severely outdated

Now this is the one thing about Debian that I really consider really ugly - patching instead of updating. Thinking you know a piece of software better than its developers is a good way to break it, IMO. See for instance the infamous SSH bug.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2010-07-31 21:00:06)

karol · 2010-07-31 21:43:53

> See for instance the infamous SSH bug.
I'm sorry, but from where I stood it looked like a communication problem.

dem05k41 · 2012-01-22 17:00:50

Misfit138 wrote:

I always found Debian to be high quality.
Intrepid wrote:
..These kinds of decisions are what makes me admire their KISS principles as well as their "don't let it break" principle...
I do not view Debian as the slightest bit 'KISS'. I would describe it as anything but.
Example 1:
root@debian:~# echo $EDITOR
vim
Ok...so..
root@debian:~# visudo
  GNU nano 2.0.7                   File: /etc/sudoers.tmp                                             

# /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#

Defaults        env_reset

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Uncomment to allow members of group sudo to not need a password
# (Note that later entries override this, so you might need to move
# it further down)
%sudo ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

                                          [ Read 22 lines ]
^G Get Help      ^O WriteOut      ^R Read File     ^Y Prev Page     ^K Cut Text      ^C Cur Pos
^X Exit          ^J Justify       ^W Where Is      ^V Next Page     ^U UnCut Text    ^T To Spell
$EDITOR is vim, as exported from ~/.bashrc, yet visudo grabs nano. FAIL.
Why?
Example 2:
root@debian:~# ls -l /usr/bin/editor 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2010-02-13 14:44 /usr/bin/editor -> /etc/alternatives/editor
root@debian:~# ls -l /etc/alternatives/editor
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-02-13 14:44 /etc/alternatives/editor -> /usr/bin/nano
/usr/bin/editor, a symlink pointing to /etc/alternatives/editor, another symlink pointing to /usr/bin/nano.
A nice system. But definitely not KISS.

I can say nothing except that you do noy understand Debian.
To change an alternative you should use:

$ update-alternatives --config editor

That's all.

ewaller · 2012-01-22 19:44:06

dem05k41,
Welcome to Arch Linux. Unfortunately, this thread is almost a year and a half old, and is probably no longer relevant. To keep things clean, and to prevent old information from confusing contemporary issues, our policy is to close old threads.

If there is a contemporary issue which needs to be addressed, please feel free to open a new thread and refer back to this thread. We definitely do not want to promote any misconceptions about Debian, it is a fine distribution. On the other hand, we don't need a debate of the merits of it versus Arch.

Arch Linux

#26 2010-07-27 09:12:45

Re: The Debian Experience

#27 2010-07-29 14:49:23

Re: The Debian Experience

#28 2010-07-29 14:56:39

Re: The Debian Experience

#29 2010-07-30 16:50:39

Re: The Debian Experience

#30 2010-07-30 16:57:10

Re: The Debian Experience

#31 2010-07-30 16:58:26

Re: The Debian Experience

#32 2010-07-30 21:48:58

Re: The Debian Experience

#33 2010-07-30 22:22:38

Re: The Debian Experience

#34 2010-07-31 20:14:58

Re: The Debian Experience

#35 2010-07-31 20:33:41

Re: The Debian Experience

#36 2010-07-31 20:59:11

Re: The Debian Experience

#37 2010-07-31 21:43:53

Re: The Debian Experience

#38 2012-01-22 17:00:50

Re: The Debian Experience

#39 2012-01-22 19:44:06

Re: The Debian Experience

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