Thoughts on Debian Linux?

vinhsynd · 2011-03-10 04:46:54

I tend to classify distributions by package manager first and abstractions second.

The idea of taking another distribution as a base then slapping your favorite desktop environment on it with new wallpaper, couple of different default apps and calling it a distribution has always felt a little dirty to me.

So for debian I tend to lump it with ubuntu, Mepis, knoppox, damn small, crunchbang together as a single broad entity with inter-divisons based on different styles of subsystem abstraction.

Approaching it from this standpoint, I don't have fond memories of dpkg, apt or any of the graphical overlays implemented in the different distributions. I managed create lots of user-error all over the place and wreak havoc with the package management in most of these.

Of these however, probably liked mepis the most.

Korrode · 2011-03-10 05:23:33

My foray into Linux went:

Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch

After moving to a Debian Testing (netinst) setup, I looked back at Ubuntu with distaste, but I can't say the same about Debian since moving to Arch. Debian is just a different beast than Arch. I still like Debian, I use it on servers and even on my workstation at work.

I find Debian's cross-app integration useful and desirable for a server and of course the stability/security is hard to beat.

The friend of mine who introduced me to Linux years ago put it like this:
"When you learn Debian, you're not learning Linux, you're learning Debian."
Which I agree with to this day, but I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing. Debian being a 'separate' OS in itself is basically their intended goal.

b9anders · 2011-03-10 19:01:37

My foray into Debian, aside from Ubuntu, was via Sidux, which gave me a very nice intro to the world under the hood there. Requires updates outside of X, but will hold your hand all the way through. You could play around with stuff in sid, and still be confident it would hold together. Looking back, my kde 3.5.9 sidux dekstop was as a near perfect blend of usability (I love kde), stability and speed, given the time and hardware it was running on then that I am not sure have been matched for me since.

Since then, I've run stable, testing, sid, even exp, as primary distros. My xfce and e17 desktops in testing were very satisfactory solutions for me for a long time.

Eventually, I found my way to arch and when I think of debian now, I shudder to think of wrapping my head around apt and all the various wrappers for it. The fact that you need multiple programs to maintain your packages with is a turn-off for me now and although very powerful, apt is such a huge clunky beast compared to pacman. Not to mention they have a different way of handling a great many things compared to what I am used to on arch and the slack-based distros I've used (mostly zenwalk), both of which are a lot more KISS.

That said, I love the repositories and possibilities. And if you knew what you were doing, it was great fun to live in sid as you could play around with the bleeding edge of just about anything in the linux world without too many bugs. Testing was always a fairly solid experience and way faster my for me than equivalent desktops in ubuntu.

If arch disappeared, I'd probably reluctantly find my way back to debian as my primary distro.

Inxsible · 2011-03-10 19:27:42

b9anders wrote:

Eventually, I found my way to arch and when I think of debian now, I shudder to think of wrapping my head around apt and all the various wrappers for it.

My sentiments exactly. When I was using Ubuntu..I just used to blindly dpkg at times without thinking why I am doing this -- maybe someone on the forums might have said it. But with pacman, I get a feeling of understanding what I am doing using its man pages. dpkg, aptitude, apt-get, apt-cache just too much confusion since many had overlapping options and flags/switches.

b9anders wrote:

If arch disappeared, I'd probably reluctantly find my way back to debian as my primary distro.

However, If Arch disappeared...I'd probably go to Slackware or FreeBSD

aurocha · 2011-03-10 19:41:47

Hi,

You'll find a lot of thoughts on Debian, as you will do about Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distribution.
It all comes to one thing and one thing only, as it is completely subjective and even stupid to defend some distro superiority: personal taste.

Debian is a giant! Supports anything. I love it, it is my favourite distribution alongside Arch. I was stuck with Debian for years until I decided to give Arch a go and the only reason why I did that was because I read it was similar to my beloved Slackware, another great distribution.

I use both Debian and Arch Linux and I think Arch grows towards a Debian model: multi-national, multi-platform, with an an intelligent community behind it. Of course Debian is much older and used as a template for many distributions. i don't even think of Debian as a distribution anymore. It is the base of many distributions.

In this thread over here (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=104261&p=2) i stated what I think of Ubuntu and Debian.
I quote:

When someone tells me that this or that distribution is "shit" I tend to ignore such comment.
A Linux distribution - any distro - is what the user makes of it.

I hear a lot of discussion on how fast Arch is compared to other distros and this and that. That's nonsensical discussion. Of course the default Arch configuration, because is simple, seems faster. But you can tune any Linux distribution and make it as fast as default Arch.

I prefer talking to a reasonable person, one that no longer needs to make the choice of a distribution a holy war or an affirmative attitude.
Use what you like best, don't condescend, and preferebly just try other distros. It gives great experience on other philosophies. I personally like Arch and do not find it "geek" oriented at all! Gentoo is much more "geek oriented" as you have to compile everything!

I simply love the AUR concept, fell in love with it.

Ubuntu is great material. I don't use it because I don't need/want to use it. I use Debian.
Ubuntu is easy to install and of course that draws attention to someone who wants to try Linux. That person, may become a happily satisfied Arch Linux customer in the near future :-) . Or not! And that's great too.

Why do I use Arch or Debian?
Several things:

1. I like minimal installs. Arch provides this, so does Debian (netinstall or even businesscard.iso ~40MB)
2. I like to control what I'm installingl. Arch and Debian do this.
3. I like to build my own system according to what I want to use/test at the time
4. I like to test new, recent software. Arch allows me to do this, so does Debian - contrary to popular belief which disregards Debian's unstable and experimental repositories.

Why do I especially love Arch linux?
- Easy to master
- Easy to maintain
- Has a great community behind it
- Well documented
- Well documented
- Well documented :-)
- Well documented: The beginners guide is a must read, very complete and concise. The very best starting point and a major strength on Arch, which takes me to the next point
- Has the best wiki I have ever seen
- The Forum is a must!
- Very good looking image and webpage.
- AUR. That's just easy to love.
- No Company owns it :-)

It is an intelligent, well oriented community distribution.
As to Debian, that webpage/look/wiki need an urgent upgrade :-)

Use Ubuntu if you like it, why not?
If you have the time, patience, just install Arch and enjoy.

Regards and greetings from Portugal,

- aurocha

Long live both Arch and Debian :-)
Regards,

- aurocha

hitest · 2011-03-26 06:22:18

I ran Debian for several years and liked it, but, I find the philosophical gnu tirade a bit tiresome. I am primarily a Slackware user who runs one Arch box. I really admire the speed of Arch Linux. If Slackware ever disappeared I would run Arch full time:)

Last edited by hitest (2011-03-26 06:23:31)

akb825 · 2011-04-02 19:27:18

Like a few of the other posters, I started with Ubuntu, moved to Debian, then to Arch. With the experience I had with each, I was able to gain the knowledge necessary to move to the next distrobution.

I moved to Debian Testing from Ubuntu for two main reasons. One was because I didn't like the 6 month freeze with Ubuntu: it's fine if the kernel and DE are frozen, but why should things like office programs and media players be frozen beyond the normal releases upstream? The second was because the update of Ubuntu killed my accelerated video and sound... I decided on Debian Testing since I had already gained some familiarity with apt in Ubuntu.

My first introduction to Debian Testing wasn't very good, as they were in transition with GNOME and the Nautilus and keyboard shortcut configuration utilities would crash... I was able to get around that with gconf and eventually it was fixed, but I think it was a couple months until I was able to successfully launch those utilities. Apart from a few other things breaking it was decently stable when I used it for a year and a half.

I had two major problems with it. First was their gigantic metapackages. It came with their gnome metapackage installed by default, but I wanted to remove the totem plugin for Firefox. (or Iceweasel, as they brand it) The problem is, the totem plugin is part of the gnome metapackage, so it marked all gnome packages for removal. I ended up pinning the packages so they would no longer be autoremoved, but that ended up biting me almost a year and a half later when I decided to switch to xfce. Since there was no easy way to make sure all those packages and their dependencies would be removed, I decided it would just be simpler to re-install the system.

The other major issue I had was out of date packages. For most packages, they were decently up to date in Testing. However, there were some that were incredibly out of date. The worst culprit was Iceweasel, which was stuck at 3.5, and since I'm on a 64 bit system it isn't exactly easy to just download the latest version of Firefox. That, plus who knows when they'll finally push xfce 4.8 through to Testing, as it's still only in Experimental. That's what finally pushed me to switch to Arch. (I just installed it last weekend, actually) The more up to date packages fixed a number of other problems, too, such as finally letting me use vsync with Compiz on my NVidia card. I still use Debian Stable for my server though, and will continue to do so.

picilli · 2011-04-05 09:09:54

I started with Debian-2.0 codenamed Hamm back in 1999. Everything was all right, until... can't remember what Deb version, but some day they introduced and never failed to strongly recommend a new program "aptitude" for managing packages and updates.
I perceived it as they are trying to fix something that isn't broken, because "dselect" for all kinds of package management and tracking dependencies was just as perfect.

It started to get on my nerves but I endured another few years, until they began to suggest Synaptic, also for a package management, which was visibly slower than ncurses based dselect, and with no functionall benefits over dselect, and even with much less options than dselect.
I still used dselect, dpkg and its tools, although I didn't like what they were doing - suggesting or recommending something new which was either slower or just different from their traditional, faster and rock-stable tools.

And the most important to me: over the years their strict standards led to abandoning or expulging from the distro several nice programs I l iked very much, as soon as they would detect a piece of the code has changed a bit and is no longer up to their "free" standards.

I couldn't stand it any more. Other than that I was OK with Debian.

P.S: I like Arch, but I am missing dselect very much.

Last edited by picilli (2011-04-05 09:47:29)

whiteychs · 2011-04-06 05:01:12

I gave Debian a whirl a few days ago but wiped it in favor of Arch for two primary reasons.

1. Ancient packages. Running wine 1.1.x in testing? Sure, there are 3rd parties that have binaries of 1.3 floating around, but it's the simply fact that they have an ancient version of a very popular program in their [testing] repos. That's not to say -all- of their packages are old, but enough to make it a deterrence for bleeding edge users.

2. Apt. It's convoluted and complicated. I played around with aptitude and synaptic for a day or two and called it quits. It wasn't unbearable to use, but it was irking after having used pacman in all its simplicity and transparency. Different strokes I suppose. I prefer to KISS with pacman and AUR while a Debian user may prefer the idiosyncrasies of apt.

One point with apt goes to repo pinning. Makes it insanely easy to downgrade and mix (eeek) packages. There's something to be said for having 3-6 different versions of a package available from the repos.

Apt does have package signing, but honestly I don't care that much about it.

If Arch disappeared I'd probably go to Slack or possibly Gentoo before Debian, but it's still a nice distro. I believe the problem is that Arch spoils me rotten.

Last edited by whiteychs (2011-04-06 05:05:02)

Korrode · 2011-04-06 05:44:17

edit:
removed

was going off knowledge from when I ran Debian, which is now incorrect

even the Debian repo provided by Wine themselves has old 1.1.x release... weird.

Last edited by Korrode (2011-04-06 05:55:14)

GI Jack · 2011-04-10 10:24:05

I dunno, I LIKE debian, but its really not usable as a desktop OS.....(too old software). Debian was my first love, and always has a spot in my heart.

server side, thats another story. Oh, that and you have over 30,000 maintained packages, I think the largest and biggest variety you see in linux, which are compatible with a whole host of derivatives like mint, ubuntu....and maemo. I have an n900 which runs maemo, I run debian's version of libc6/tzdata/locales and therefor most text mode debian apps....run unmolested.

Oh, but its stable, and very secure. It runs great server side, and working with various projects where you don't need new features(but need stability). I don't mind working with apt.

SoFarSoGood · 2011-04-18 18:44:14

I've tested zillions of distros over the past 15 years, but somehow i always went back to Debian. Its getting better and better these days, esp. the new 6.0 release with lots of improvements i was missing for long, like faster boot speed etc. Having said that though, not even Debian unstable is anywhere near to arch when it comes to bleeding edge packages. Just look at the kernel versions. The desktop (Gnome in my case) is pretty bloated which sometimes makes package upgrades a little bumpy when using Debian unstable, but it's simply the one distro i can count on to always be there. How many distros did i watch rise up high just to eventually become history. Debian is always what i expect it to be. It's not perfect, but it works well, and i expect it to do so in 5 or 10 years aswell.

Frankly, there is no Linux distro out there which i would give 10 out of 10 points, not even 9. All distros have their flaws, and so does Debian. Bloated, outdated, too many different apt tools all for the same purpose, and one of the most boring Linux websites on the planet. And it's not so much GNU/vanilla as one might think. 7 out of 10 i would say.

Currently i'm using Debian (stable/desktop), arch (desktop) for more bleeding-edge stuff and Debian (console) as backup/rescue system (the latter installed on all PCs as well as one installation on USB, just in case).

uc50ic4more · 2011-04-18 19:33:41

I just switched from Debian to Arch a few weeks ago. I still have about a dozen systems I handle for friends, family and neighbours that are still running Debian Squeeze until I have my Arch test system ironed out a bit more acutely. (I have a no-DM, no-DE system I run for everyone to make best use of their low-spec systems.)

I found Debian to be darn near as perfect as could be in an OS: It is well tested, stable (both in terms of "stable" as "doesn't crash" and "stable" as "doesn't change"), easy to use and administer, values free-as-in-freedom and it provides both (almost) limitless configuration and setup options while also "holding your hand" by auto-configuring many things. It is, of course, invaluable as a base on top of which others can create valuable OS's. The only reason(s) I made the switch was/ were that not using a DM or DE left me using some packages that were not given quite the attention that some of the more mainstream packages got. (This is my subjective impression, of course; not an indictment of any package mantainers' efforts nor an implication that anything was neglected!) This, coupled with the fact that most of the packages were quite outdated by the time Squeeze was released (Midori, for example, as it stands in Squeeze was a crashy mess for me...) left me having to do a lot of mixing between Stable, Testing, Unstable and even Experimental.

Arch has been a little bit more fulfilling in that I've been a little bit more "connected" to the ground-up construction of my system. Between the official packages and the AUR I've been able to get every application I'd been using with my Debian system; and so far I've had very, very few problems.

It should also be acknowledged that the forums here and the wiki are unparalleled in their helpfulness and friendliness; a stark contrast to the Debian community.

Last edited by uc50ic4more (2011-04-18 19:36:25)

aurocha · 2011-04-23 15:31:40

If the premise by which you base your point of view is that "arch is good and debian is bad because the software is too old", such premise might be incorrect because of several reasons:

- 1. I hear everyone mentioning Testing; what about Unstable (sid)?
- 2 You are comparing two distinct 'ways' to build a system: a rolling release, like arch, and a point of release on, geared to stability, debian.
- 3. Do all of you know about the Experimental repository?
- 4. You can learn to build a .deb package by yourself
- 5. You don't need too because almost all of them are available via apt-get
- 6. apt-get and aptitude are frontends to dpkg. Don't run away scared if you didn't like aptitude - i don't use it; try apt-get, synaptic, or any other front-end
- 7. Consider the size of the distribution, it's multi-platform approach, and the fact that they try to deliver a distro for every platform there is.
- 8. It is based in community effort, very much like arch is
- 9. I had no problem whatsoever with the debian community (#debian on freenode) and I'm not sure if everyone knows about http://forums.debian.net

Just try it.
It's natural to struggle with the system very much like a debian user struggles with a fresh arch install (happened to me)
I find it very hard not to like arch or debian, they are different beasts.

I think arch is growing to a debian like model: community based but it has been able to maintain its mais philosophy goals, simplicity of design, and the so called "code correctness".
But there are many challenges for the future that Debian - as a community - has already overcome.

Arch is missing package signing. It is a priority. Debian already has that.
After all this said, let me tell you that I run arch on my laptop because I like to try things.
And I'm currently trying the new, fresh and buggy Gnome 3.

Regards,

- aurocha

Last edited by aurocha (2011-06-04 18:38:31)

herzen · 2011-04-29 06:03:31

Carlwill wrote:

Obviously Arch Linux isn't well suited for production servers at my work so we elected to have all our servers run Debian Linux.

No Linux distro is well suited for production servers. That is why Arch is the only honest Linux distro I'm aware of: it doesn't pretend that it belongs on a production server.

I find Debian Linux to have no useful purpose at all. I run OpenIndiana, the principal free Solaris distro, on my home server/workstation, and Arch when I want to try out something that hasn't been ported to Solaris yet.

Korrode · 2011-04-29 10:40:33

herzen wrote:

Carlwill wrote:
Obviously Arch Linux isn't well suited for production servers at my work so we elected to have all our servers run Debian Linux.
No Linux distro is well suited for production servers.

I disagree. I could supply evidence of the likes of Debian and RHEL being proven reliable performers, but it shouldn't be necessary, we all know some of the most expansive and demanding content delivery systems run Linux, and they run well.

Last edited by Korrode (2011-04-29 10:41:07)

aurocha · 2011-04-29 13:32:25

?
Linux isn't suited for production servers? The facts tell quite the opposite. Linux IS already present in demanding and production scenarios for quite some time now.
AND it is growing as a desktop OS too.

The market share RHEL, CentOS, SuSE, Ubuntu and even Debian explore, is precisely the one of production servers, so that alegation doen't make any sense.

You might prefer Unix or some Solaris/*BSD based solution, but Linux has proven itself to deliver the same content.
But I can see where you're trying to get at: Many, especially communication companies, prefer Sun Hardware and OS's - Checkpoint firewalls and the likes.

But don't be fooled, Google, it is said, runs Linux as most of the web servers of service providers run any onther corporate distribution.

Regards,

- aurocha

Carlwill · 2011-04-29 14:36:46

RHEL and Debian are amazing server distributions with stability and security in mind. I look at Arch like I do at cars. It's fast, super performance, but unreliable and requires a little more effort to keep it running smoothly. Debian is the Honda Civic. It's not fast, wont get babes, but keeps packages a bit dated for stability.

Kane · 2011-04-29 15:04:41

The problem i have with debian, was the debacle with openssl.
I will never trust distributions which try to fix bugs themselves rather than sending it upstream (as arch do).

Korrode · 2011-04-29 15:47:49

Kane wrote:

I will never trust distributions which try to fix bugs themselves rather than sending it upstream (as arch do).

AFAIK, Debian do send bugfixes upstream, but yeah they will implement them in Debian packages prior to being accepted upstream.

Kane wrote:

The problem i have with debian, was the debacle with openssl.

One instance in well over a decade where their own bufixing caused a really serious issue...

manzdagratiano · 2011-05-01 04:32:01

I am a die-hard Debian fan - Debian was the first distro that led me to believe that GNU/Linux could be amiable, and finally, a viable alternative from Winblows. I have a quintuple boot, one of which is Debian Sid. It runs rock solid stable just like Debian itself, provided you heed warning to 'apt-listbugs' before pushing updates.

tlmiller · 2011-05-03 23:41:18

I use Debian as my primary OS (although humorously I'm posting from OpenSuse), and have for years. The only thing I dislike about it is the absolutely sloth-like pace at which they update software, even in SID. For instance, right now, 4.6.1 is the current KDE desktop. SID (supposed unstable, bleeding edge, HAH) has 4.4.5.
Firefox 4.01 current, in SID Iceweasel 3.5.18

etc. etc. etc.

Great OS, but so far behind the curve in keeping modern software.

aurocha · 2011-05-04 19:00:40

Hi,

Just enable the experimental repository. Iceweasel 4.0.1-2 available for quite some time now - I've been using. As you all know Iceweasel = Firefox.

Package iceweasel
•experimental (web): Navegador web baseado no Firefox
4.0.1-2: amd64 armel i386 ia64 mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc
4.0-3: alpha kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386

As to KDE, you're right, they are still with that version of KDE.... except..
Except if you try:

http://qt-kde.debian.net/

Regards,

bwat47 · 2011-05-07 21:54:57

Debian is a good distro, but even unstable tends to have packages that are too outdated for me. Main reason why I prefer arch, its got really up to date packages and tends to me more stable than debian unstable.

tlmiller · 2011-05-07 22:06:10

bwat47 wrote:

Debian is a good distro, but even unstable tends to have packages that are too outdated for me. Main reason why I prefer arch, its got really up to date packages and tends to me more stable than debian unstable.

Sooooo true. I finally actually broke down and enabled experimental last night. I just couldn't deal with how dated certain things were anymore.

As far as stability, I've definitely found Debian SID to be more stable (as far as programs) than Arch, but as a whole, they're probably about equal.

Last edited by tlmiller (2011-05-07 22:08:20)

Arch Linux

#51 2011-03-10 04:46:54

Re: Thoughts on Debian Linux?

#52 2011-03-10 05:23:33

Re: Thoughts on Debian Linux?

#53 2011-03-10 19:01:37

Re: Thoughts on Debian Linux?

#54 2011-03-10 19:27:42

Re: Thoughts on Debian Linux?

#55 2011-03-10 19:41:47

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#56 2011-03-26 06:22:18

Re: Thoughts on Debian Linux?

#57 2011-04-02 19:27:18

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#58 2011-04-05 09:09:54

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#59 2011-04-06 05:01:12

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#60 2011-04-06 05:44:17

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#61 2011-04-10 10:24:05

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#62 2011-04-18 18:44:14

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#63 2011-04-18 19:33:41

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#64 2011-04-23 15:31:40

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#65 2011-04-29 06:03:31

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#66 2011-04-29 10:40:33

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#67 2011-04-29 13:32:25

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#68 2011-04-29 14:36:46

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#69 2011-04-29 15:04:41

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#70 2011-04-29 15:47:49

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#71 2011-05-01 04:32:01

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#72 2011-05-03 23:41:18

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#73 2011-05-04 19:00:40

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#74 2011-05-07 21:54:57

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#75 2011-05-07 22:06:10

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