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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Debian is an ancient African word meaning "Can't be bothered anymore with whatever Ubuntu is pulling off in the next release".

I guess anybody interested in a minimal Ubuntu install would be better off installing Debian instead. The value Ubuntu added "back in the day" was end-user friendliness, where end-user is somebody not necessarily technical. But that's kinda pointless anyway for a minimal install. Ubuntu was also useful vs Debian for its regular release schedule and long term support but you basically have this with Debian too nowadays and it's been like this for years now.

Can't wait to have the linux kernel installed as a Snap package.

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Thanks for the laugh, that first line is amazing

IMO, PopOS is the ideal Ubuntu alternative right now. They're mostly doing things right. For Desktop, anyway.

I tried Pop_OS! on my gaming laptop last year.

It does have some nice UI improvements.

It is also terrible:

- Suspend did not work

- My GPU would always be activated, which would make my fan run at maximum speed.

- Steam didn't work out of the box, so I never actually played any games, which was the whole point. Steam did work with some effort on regular Ubuntu.

- Eventually, the system became glitchy in record time, i.e. random crashes.

Going back to Ubuntu server edition, I felt like I had been given a new computer again.

I don't have any of those problems on my Dell XPS laptop. Installed it in October-ish.

Same for me. Ran perfectly on my Thinkpad X1E (including for gaming!).

But does Debian have the same security support speed as Ubuntu?

Debian is a community project, therefore everything is best-effort rather than guaranterd like Ubuntu or RHEL/-clones.

Although for all the hate it gets, Ubuntu Pro is genuinely a good offering when comparing it to something like RHEL.

Also fuck snaps, no body wants to use that crap, neither on the desktop(flatpak is just better) or the server(use containers already).

All the data is there: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/

I'm asking in general, is it as fast as Ubuntu?

You’d have to ask someone who runs both Debian and Ubuntu systems; I don’t know.

If you want to study the data, I guess you could compare <https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/rss.xml> with <https://www.debian.org/security/dsa-long>.

I've been using Linux for...huh, I guess next year makes 30 years. I run Ubuntu on all of my machines, because it's easy and well-supported and I got tired of tinkering with my Linux install for its own sake roughly 20 years ago.

I'm in the same boat.

26 years of Linux, been running Ubuntu for at least a decade.

Ubuntu server on laptops, because it gives me nice things.

Debian on servers, because it's minimal and conservative.

Linux since Slackware 1.0, and started using Ubuntu as soon as it was available. Still using it on some cloud servers, but they've put enough dents in my "trust" sentiment that I avoid using them where possible, now, and my desktops are usually Manjaro.

I'm unhappy with them but it will be a tragedy when they are finally acquired.

Can recommend considering Endeavour as a Manjaro alternative.

the lxc-lxd and snap issues are the stuff that makes me go from "I don't care about ubuntu" to "I hate ubuntu"

What wrong with lxd on Ubuntu?

LXD is only available via Ubuntu proprietary Snap packages and not native .deb packages. Native as in Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, and .deb packages are the native package for Debian.

Snap has some downsides for server/infrastructure packages. Automatic updating being the most visible, but they are generally all about lack of control. This is what Snap does, it moves the power from users to developers.

Not true any longer. Debian has been officially [1] supporting LXD Debian packages [2] since September last year. And you can add this APT repo [3] — which follows the same Debian recipes - into your sources.list to install LXD natively with APT.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

[2] https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/lxd

[3] https://apt.calenhad.com/

I uninstalled/purged snap on a machine my coworker provisioned, we don't use anything that snap offers. After that I don't have an issue with Ubuntu at all.

I looked at moving our cloud machines to Debian rather than Ubuntu. I concluded it may not be worth it:

- Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this.

- Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this)

- Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81

- I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack)

+ No snap shit.

If anyone can provide me with more ammo to move to Debian I'd welcome it.

> - Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this.

Then don’t install it? I don’t get the problem.

> - Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this)

Fixed and released a week ago: https://bugs.debian.org/892664

> - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81

Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it.

> - I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack)

“No obvious performace improvements” is a negative? What you can reasonably expect of Debian is the same as Ubuntu, minus the bloatware.

> > - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81

> Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it.

1.74 was a year old when bullseye was released, and there had been at least three boost releases in that time. PHP is another example. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 :

> PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)…

There is plenty of software this happens to in Debian, and Debian isn't the only distro this happens with. We need distros maintaining stability as must as we need distros moving fast and breaking things, and everywhere in between. It just means that some distros might not be an exact fit for all use cases. And that's fine.

The Debian packager of PHP and Apache also provides a neat repository with very up to date versions: https://deb.sury.org/

> > PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)…

Packaging PHP 8 would have required to drop, e.g., the mediawiki package, which only become compatible with PHP 8 in 1.39, released November 2022.

Boost 1.81 in Debian currently has some bugs which prevent its inclusion in Debian proper: https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?experimental=1&package=boo...

> - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81

Debian is released every two years. Debian gets security updates through LTS for five years.

If the packages in Debian are "old" it's because of the biennial release cycle. As a sysadmin I'm fine with that, and Debian is no worse than Ubuntu which has its LTS every two years as well.

If you're on the desktop then there could be an advantage to running the more frequent non-LTS releases. But I'm fine with the biennial LTS, which makes Debian and Ubuntu roughly equivalent.

Though Ubuntu LTS has more sane exceptions for things like browsers and desktop apps pre-snap.

Unattended-upgrades is one of the reasons I used to install Ubuntu as a default server OS. Combining that and an automated reboot is practically all you need to keep your server secure enough in most cases.

Ubuntu runs boost 1.74 just like Debian. Upgrading to a new version is likely to break stuff and neither Ubuntu not Debian are rolling release distros, so it wouldn't make sense for them to update already. The upcoming 23.04 not containing the newer Boost version makes less sense, unless there are compatibility problems that can't be fixed before release.

Either way, Debian is Ubuntu without all the Ubuntu. If Ubuntu works for you now, Debian will probably work for you with minimal changes to your workflow. In many cases it packages more recent versions of software because it's "LTS" cycles are faster than Ubuntu's.

If you want rolling release updates completely under your control, consider Arch or one of its derivatives (Endeavour/Manjaro/etc.) instead. All three of them come with the warning that a standard system update can make your OS unbootable if you don't read the change logs, but that's just a consequence of always using the latest and greatest.

Downthread there's this:

>>Canonical has been taking steps to advertise their paid offerings in increasing velocity lately. Is there something that's been triggering this?

>https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo... "Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023" (April 2022 story).

So it sounds like it is the start of an active commercialisation of the users. Since Snap started getting pushed more heavily I've been looking to change. I've tried Pop_OS but it doesn't fit well for me. I want to stay on a relatively vanilla KDE ... probably try Debian next (been on Ubuntu for something like 15 years, was Slackware before that).

> Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81

You can always run Debian testing or sid if you don't need rock solid stability.

If you don't want to do that, you can stay on Debian stable and use the backports repo: https://backports.debian.org/

> Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this)

Well... okay? You can't install Fedora RPMs on it either. Installing packages from another distro might sometimes work, but only more or less by coincidence; you really shouldn't be doing that.

>I guess anybody interested in a minimal Ubuntu install would be better off installing Debian instead.

Do debian ships with a microsoft signed bootloader ? Is that easy to install on Debian ?

> Do debian ships with a microsoft signed bootloader ?

Yes.

Yes, Debian comes with a signed bootloader and kernel.

Yes. Debian ships with shim-signed which has been signed by Microsoft UEFI CA & will in turn boot grub-efi-amd64-signed which will then boot a signed kernel. So you have a chain of trust from a standard UEFI system to the kernel.

All of this is installed by default with a normal Debian install.

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