Slowly, methodically, and with minimal user impact.
As mentioned at the end of the article, what first appears a waste of time for a small issue could also be seen as a beautiful illustration of the democratic process that makes Debian so stable/widely adopted.
In the end they are working on a distro with certain ideals and this illustrates how they can achieve things with their ideals in mind.
I tried Manjaro the other day -- out of the box, wake from sleep was broken, bluetooth was broken, and 3/3 printers were broken. I eventually got sleep working with an older kernel version, I got bluetooth working with config file hacking, and I got the printers working with CUPS wrangling -- but on Ubuntu, all of this Just Worked for me.
That's the point of it.
I am confused. Isn't the article about an individual just randomly deciding to deprecate which and the resulting fallout that impacted all of Debians users?
That is how things get done. If you do the work you get to decide.
In the 0.001% that an issue get taken up by the technical committee as being important for the whole project, then after usually a long time they make a decision that in special cases may overrule the maintainer. That happens about once or twice a year? I am unsure how often a decision actually goes against the maintainer, and there is only a few cases a year (https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte).
This naturally doesn't stop anyone from being too active on the mailing lists and arguing over small things, but I would think people are wasting less time there than they do arguing lesser important topics on social media.
Many years ago, I posted that stable was too old. All the Debian users were quick to tell me to run testing, that it wasn't a bad experience in spite of the name. Well, after converting all my machines to Debian, a package that was critical to my work was broken and I was not at all impressed with the handling of the situation, so I moved on. I can definitely see something like the story in the article playing out.
I am not a sysadmin and very far from an expert so my take on this is entirely anecdotal and likely partially wrong.
But ever since I moved to Manjaro (after briefly trying Arch and deciding that I don't want to build my own house brick by brick) I've only had 1-2 problems ever and they were fixed literally the day after with the next system-wide update command. The one and only exception is the last problem I had: namely an OpenSSH upgrade hard-deprecated a few signing algorithms so I was unable to SSH into my servers. And that was solved with half a minute of search on ManjaroForum. Smooth sailing.
For all the BS surrounding the "systemd vs. whatever-else-the-other-thing-was", I found the former made my life as a mid-tier Linux user and home-grown server admin much easier, too.
I run Debian on my servers because I like not having to wrestle with Yast2 or deal with the constant churn for churn's sake of certain RPM-based distros.
The above quote hasn't really been a thing since at least Debian 8, and possibly 7. Certainly when it came time to upgrade to 11, if package configs were being overwritten I was presented with a diff and asked what I wanted to do.
“tips fedora” “neckbeard” etc. I’m actually afraid to mention I use it to some groups!
Come to think of it, I never checked what Manjaro even means.
As time goes by (I am 41) I really find it less and less appealing to argue with people, on HN included. People can tell you "just do X, you won't regret it!" or "use Y, most of your problems will go away" but you are there happily doing A and using B and they serve you perfectly.
So if I am asked about what would I recommend as best practices, I always say: "if you have needs X, Y and Z, then using A and B is perfect".
Just saying "use Arch, it's best Linux eva duuuuude" is of course unproductive.
YMMV, Debian isn't for everyone, but it's been rock solid for me with very few exceptions, far fewer than I've seen from other folks with other distributions.
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to some of the anti-systemd stuff, but I've found writing systemd units so much easier and more reliable than upstart or sysv init scripts. And sd_notify is great.
'everyone' = existing users. New users are generally harmed by redundancy and mess.
As in all things, it is a balancing act.
As an anecdote. I developed a product in a field where the main players were extremely well established with codebases dating back to punch card days. Their software could do everything you might imagine wanting it to do. But it was also so complex, you had to take a training course to learn it. But what's interesting is there were customers of those competitors who also bought my product because it was quicker and easier to get common things done. All that power actually let to a worse product in some ways.