Why Use Debian Stable on the Desktop?
wayoflinux.com
wayoflinux.com
Desktop usage (terminals, browsers, editors, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, media listening/viewing and light creation) should not be surprising. It should not change out from underneath the user.
I've run Debian Stable for more than 15 years as my primary desktop system, almost always with XFCE. I add the Google Chrome repository and download the latest Firefox and Firefox Nightly. That's it. The whole thing runs really nicely on an i5-2500 with 16GB RAM and 2 SSDs in a ZFS mirror. I'll need new hardware when I switch from 2 1920x1200 monitors to a big 4K screen; I won't need to change my OS.
To be fair, I'd expect any OS to run nicely on that spec.
W10 does a fair few things wrong, but performance is not really one of them, unless you're on a Pentium 4 or something.
Windows seem to require many many CPU cycles just to update itself and index files (yet cortana never seems to find anything, but that's another discussion).
So if you want to install VSCode, Telegram, Skype, Stremio, Sublime Text, Python 3.6, clipgrab, steam, dukto, tilix, etc. You know that half of them won't work out of the box on debian stable. Each year it will be different ones, to make it spicier, for different reasons that can take a huge amount of time and energy to figure it, if you ever do.
Then if you need to do anything exotic, and it's worse. E.G: I'm currently compiling a lot of crypto currency wallets (I run a master node automation service). Most of them will compile only on Ubuntu. And if you don't want precisely Ubuntu 12.04 (I compile for 16.04), you'll need a little tweak.
Don't mistake that for hatred. I donate to the debian project financially, I adore them.
But for the desktop, it's really not making my life easy.
Edit: I found the "offending phrase", I think. I dare you to click the link, it leads to a (free) online book. :D
That said, Debian Stable is an ideal desktop OS for older hardware. I have a Mac Mini from the first generation of Intel Macs, upgraded to a Core 2 Duo CPU, that runs BunsenLabs Linux (based on Jessie and a 3.x kernel) just fine. In fact, it's one of the few Linux distros that still supports that 11 year old machine, long after even Apple left it behind.
Couldn't see running it as my desktop distro since I like to fiddle with stuff and having an older compiler and python isn't really all that desirable. Back when I hacked on blender I was even having a hard time keeping up on 'bleeding-edge' fedora since one of the main devs liked to upgrade to the newest python release as soon as it was out.
That said, I don't know how difficult it would be to install a non-Linux OS on that particular device; I know it was designed for and shipped with Debian. I've had success installing the various BSDs on all kinds of obscure hardware but I've yet to get my hands on a MyBook Live.
If Debian Stable does everything you want out of an operating system, by all means use it, there's no reason not to, but some other people may want to make use of the newer features of Linux and its surrounding ecosystem that aren't available in Debian Stable yet. The idea that Debian Stable is a good choice for all users ignores those with different desired features than the author.
In other words, people have different priorities. If you've found something that works for you, good for you, there's no need to justify it.
Because you will find shit breaking, willfully, every other month or so, because some caffeine addled code monkey thought he could do a decade+ usage-tested lib better in a new language over the weekend.
You're the only one.
Sure, but that's not what I was getting at. If the bleeding edge of Linux didn't have any attractive features, hardly anyone would use the features from it in their desktop OS.
Consider a use case. Take gaming for example. Let's say you want to get the best performance for gaming on Linux, so you don't have to upgrade your gaming rig to play a game that your existing rig should be able to handle. As far as I'm aware, there have been quite a few improvements made to GPU performance in recent kernels, particularly with AMD. What distro is going to be best for Linux gamers?
You could use the newer kernel with Debian Stable, but as the age of the platform grows, there's a high chance of mismatches between libraries. In other words, if you stick with the stock distro then stable branches have benefits, but if you introduce any new features that haven't been through the level of testing given to the stock components the guarantees of stability go out of the window.
Gentoo and Arch in my limited experience are much simpler to build packages for. Redhat too. One build file is all that's required.
I'm guilty of this myself. The script I made is heavily inspired by Arch. The resulting script for Firefox is like this: https://github.com/qznc/simpledeb/blob/master/test/firefox.D...
I agree that the documentation lacks various improvements, but i would like to add that there's a difference between building a deb package and building a deb package for Debian.
Tl;DR: To build a deb package for Debian involves lots of extra steps and cautions than to build a simple deb package because Debian is pretty strict with what can enter the official repository. The documentation needs to be improved for both cases anyway.
For those who are to afraid to run Arch, consider openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is as up to date (or more so) as Arch Linux but they do a lot of automated testing, plus they do a lot of automatic snapshots so you can go back if needed (that is if you are willing to run Btrfs).
Have you ever tried to install Tumbleweed? I was comparing the two, not using absolutes.
Should be back online now...
Damn. Maybe I need to look around.
Latest release pretty much rocks, everything works smoothly out of the box, and the system is set up and ready for multimedia audio/video/etc. content creation.
It still quite Debian underneath, but there is a lot to be said for having a multimedia workstation ready to go, out of the box, on the other end of the spectrum ..
Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nHJYRo...
<obligatory-rant> I'll never understand why serving static(!) sites is so hard. Are modern blog systems still that bad? HN traffic is far below 100 req/sec (perhaps below 10 req/sec), which should be an absolute no-brainer for any modern webserver. [1] Heck, given a good internet connection, one should be able to run 10 such blogs on a Raspberry Pi and still survive HN. </obligatory-rant>
[1] According to ServerFault, challenges start at 100000 req/sec: https://serverfault.com/q/408546/175421
challenges start at 100000 req/sec
Static site generators are a thing now.
There's this hidden assumption here that "the HN crowd" = "a huge amount of visitors". The typical HN crowd for a front-page article will be on the order of 10,000 visitors. That's really not much on the scale of the internet.
It might be true for self-written blog software, but amusingly those tend to have quite good performance ... either because these are static generators, or because these are rendered on the fly, but with very simple and hence fast templates.
However, there is no such excuse for popular CMS. Those have been developed over 10+ years, and have a wide range of users - small as well as large blogs.
Finally, I wouldn't call static HTML pages "premature optimization", but rather "the natural thing to do". Let's have a look at the data access pattern: On average, articles are written once, updated seldomly, and read at least 10x as often as written. With increasing popularity, this ratio shifts even more to the "read" direction. [1] Since the datasets are small (order of KiB or MiB), complete regeneration is feasible. Moreover, it is much simpler and less error-prone than caching. And you can speed up site generation with classic build tools (make, tup, etc.), if you want.
[1] That is, with increased popularity more articles are written due to the increased motivation, but disproportionally more readers will arrive.
It's not hard. They're all adding stupid bloat for no good reason.
When my blog was on the frontpage, traffic peaked at 1 Mbit/s (that's megabits, not megabytes) and CPU load peaked at 5% of a single core (and only because that box runs a dozen services in parallel).
Everyone who's blog cannot withstand the HN crowd deserves to have their computer operator's license revoked.
Out of the box nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 on the 1GB Linode (then the second tier) handled it perfectly fine. With no disruption to a teamspeak server that was on the same host at the time.
(BTW you're right, it's a cheap host and quite slow even when it's working. Site runs on Grav (flat-file CMS), which is a lot faster than e.g. WP and ilk (on the same chep host))
It's good to know that there is sane blog software out there, and that it is actually used.
The best option for a stable desktop is Gentoo, where you can run old software but then unmask recent stuff if you need it. As a recent example I'll say that MTP support in stable (libmtp) was flaky for my mobile phone. With Debian I would've had to suck dicks in the bug tracker forever to get the fix backported. With Gentoo I just unmask a more recent version et voilà. And that applies to any software you could ever need: you are always going to need more recent versions of certain packages at some point. Stuff that gets fixed, a certain new feature you want, a more recent kernel...
I know someone is going to mention apt pinning but that only works in theory since pinning a more recent version of a certain package usually means you have to update half your packages to unstable because of dependencies. And in that case why even use stable?
Android and iOS clearly separate system and applications and it mostly works fine.
Ubuntu tries to split off applications via snap [0], but so far adoption seems marginal.
Furthermore, everything is done, or in the way to be done, in a functional way: system configuration, deployment, etc.
There are even efforts to manage dotfiles currently getting implemented.
IMHO, the Nix way is a great leap ahead.
Everything important has been online for a long time. The web browser refresh button works fine.
Get with the times, gramps. Arch is where the racing stripes are at now. Not held back by all these weird dinosaur architectures Arch can really optimise for superior speed, and features, and modern things, leaving Slackware steamboats, Debian diesels, and Gentoo petrols in the dust, because Arch is the EV of Linux operating systems.
The world of anecdata and pointless optimalisations has transcended Gentoo. You're now the Debian stable of the next generation of Linux users, and boy do they know better!
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with apologies to any Arch and Gentoo users out there. Your OS is fine. I just thought it was amusing if you look, out of context, at these developments.
Also I don't use Gentoo to get "pointless optimisations". Ricers are the low hanging fruit that's there to be mocked. I use Gentoo because it's the best rolling out there.
That's way stronger than anything I intended to say, even if I made a bit of fun of the overly enthusiastic ones.
My joke was based on that way back when, when Gentoo was younger and the hip distro, whenever a thread discussed Debian on the desktop or server, a newly minted Gentoo user would drop by to extol the virtues of Gentoo for every use case possible: "But I use it on servers," "My desktop is so much faster," etc.
Now in this, and similar threads, I notice it's the Arch users who have taken over this function. So when you brought out Gentoo, it felt like a blast from the past, prompting me to accuse you of being "out of touch" for humourous effect. No offence (well, very minor offence) was intended, and I bear no ill will towards either Arch or Gentoo users.
Wow, just about the only OS I've never needed to reinstall is Arch (and I am a 99% Linux user and work and at home). My longest running install is something like 7 years on a desktop, and my laptops tend to die or get replaced on about a 3-4 year cycle.