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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner.

The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs in Ubuntu.

It really has been the benchmark for all free software so far. And the Toy-Story themed releases are a nice touch.

Happy birthday, Debian.

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I switched to Debian (Wheezy specifically) after 8 or so years of using Fedora (initially Fedora Core) with a year or two of Gentoo in 2008-9 or so. It really is a breath of fresh air.

You don't realize it initially but Fedora/Ubuntu are suffocating.. rapid releases changing things that didn't need to be changed (I have zero objection to actual improvements, that is the reason I used Fedora for so long (and Gentoo during a time I wasn't satisfied with Fedora's ability to keep up)), focus on the "standard" experience causing unnecessary breakage, etc.

Now I just sit on Debian, look at the other distros, and scratch my head. It seems like they are expending so much effort just spinning their tires. A new Fedora graphical installer? You're only going to use that once, and the existing one wasn't broken! Ubuntu on phones? You haven't even figured out how to get "regular" people to use it on desktops yet where your competition is mostly windows... now you want to compete with iOS and android?

Maybe they are getting somewhere, but it sure as hell appears to be inefficient. Ease off the throttle and do things right.

If you want things done slow and right, use Debian. Part of being a highly fragemented market (which the Linux desktop is) is that each distribution needs to find its own niche. Debian has the slow and stable niche pretty well covered. Ubuntu's distinguishing factor is that it is more cutting edge, and has more personality to it. Simmilarly, Fedora also states on its about page that its goal is to stay cutting edge at the cost of stability.

Remember that Fedora functions in part as RedHat-testing (to use Debian nomenclature), which both explains and justifies why they do many of the things they do.

Yea... I went from Debian to Ubuntu about 5 years ago. Switched back recently, as I've found the farther the Ubuntu gets away from Debian... the less I like it.

<3 Debian.

Be careful with taking that too far ;). That modularity and customizability was slippery slope for me--I defected from Debian to Arch in months.

And you know what comes next after Arch...

...Gentoo.

I chose FreeBSD... I wish that I would have tried FreeBSD years sooner, but I guess it's better late than never.

I run FreeBSD on my desktops, but I've found there is absolutely no option to run them on any notebooks. Linux is king for laptops.

What's wrong with running FreeBSD on laptops? Works for me...

Working suspend and resume was always the deal breaker for me and caused me to switch over to OpenBSD on my laptop.

Unfortunately, OpenBSD 5.3 didn't have any support for my Atheros WiFi card, so I'm sticking with FreeBSD.

I'll agree that many Linux distros are better for beginners, but I dislike having software which I won't use included in my operating system, and I appreciate the FreeBSD ports system and it's ease of use.

Suspend/resume would be nice, but is not a deal breaker for me, as shutting down and powering on doesn't take so long that it's unreasonable, and with a 12 cell battery my netbook runs all day on a full charge.

FreeBSD does have excellent atheros support thanks to adrian chadd. He's doing wonders for their wireless stack.

As for suspend and resume, it didn't become an issue until recently when my workflow became sit for half-an-hour to an hour, then pick up and move multiple times a day. Rebooting, opening all my programs again, etc. became tedious.

LFS with the aide of NetBSD's pkgsrc. ;)

I've been tempted to go down that route before...

Looks doable without too much work based on scanning http://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_use_pkgsrc_on_linux/

Oh yes, pkgsrc on linux in general is actually rather nice. I used to frequently use it on university machines in my home directory so that I didn't have to go through the system admins every time I wanted some little tool installed.

This never happened to me. It is easy enough to write a custom build environment pkgbuild and put it on the aur, and use an aur helper like pacaur to cache the git repos. I tried gentoo on a vm after getting frustrated and wanting to do a configure / make / install on Samba, but after a few hours compiling coreutils I gave up and concluded that it is just a silly waste of electricity for everyone in the world to recompile the same binaries, or slightly different ones with one feature change that might break interactions with a dozen other applications. Someone else can just build optimized binaries for my architecture and were good, the last 5% isn't worth the power bill, it is cheaper to just buy 5% faster parts.

But I can't go to anything but Arch. I have opensuse on my grandparents PC and I so desperately want to put Arch on it since managing the legacy in any of the distros that aren't Arch (ie, /boot/grub and /boot/grub2 on a standard install, init scripts mixed with systemd units, xinetd + systemd, etc) makes me feel like its 2003 instead of 2013. I sometimes put dual boot Ubuntu / Windows on some of my freelance IT customers to let them pick what they like and keep the other as a failsafe, but tweaking Ubuntu now feels like a chore. I still giggle with glee when installing a new Arch box though.

Actually I went from Gentoo to Arch. I tried, tirelessly, to run a stable Gentoo desktop (server is much easier). However its not worth the wait in terms of compile times or just emerge pains to begin with. The Arch model is great if you want the cutting edge with stability. Gentoo seems more bleeding edge and less reliable. Defiance is my goto on the reliable side of cloud and virtual instances. Arch and Debian are very complimentary in my case.

Debian to Arch in, no kidding, one day. I barely even knew what happened to me. I almost felt bad about it which is why I try to keep up on what's going on in Debian-land, but I was just setting up some VMs and thought I'd see what pacman was like and then [...]

I made that switch too and Im really happy I did. Same feeling as switching from Wintendo to Linux. And gnome has gotten really good!

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because:

- A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and

- B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a network effect, in other words.)

So, would, say, slapping Ubuntu's apt repo-set into Debian work to satisfy an Ubuntu-targeted DEB's prerequisites, or would there be tons and tons of conflicts?

Speaking for Docker: it's true that we've only released packages for Ubuntu, but we've been working on a Debian package as well. Starting in 0.6 we expect to offer both in parity.

On a practical note, we are forced to maintain these 2 packages separately if only because Ubuntu uses upstart and Debian doesn't.

Re: network effects of Ubuntu dependencies. In our case that was not a factor, since Docker is a static binary built in Go, and all distros are equally hapless in their management of that. In fact, we are divorcing ourselves completely from distro-specific dependency management. As of this week, docker packages are built by us in an environment we control, not the distro build farms (hint: we build docker with docker). Then we wrap it with fpm and call it a day. Separately, we are working with downstream maintainers of each distro to help them package docker in a policy-compliant way. But those are 2 completely separate tracks.

Hey shykes, I'll come into IRC to discuss this more at some point, but wouldn't it be better to give the main docker package a dependency on docker-startup-scripts and then have that dependency fulfilled either by docker-upstart or docker-sysvinit?

Grab the source packages from Ubuntu and build debs with debuild (see the man page). Most of the time, the build dependencies match up well (the dependencies for the Ubuntu-built debs don't). With pbuilder and friends it's also easy to set up your own PPA-like infrastructure.

Is it possible to run Steam on Debian? It's supported on Ubuntu, and I'm wondering if that extends to debian as well.

I haven't tried it, but probably. Ubuntu is essentially Debian, especially at a low level. Also, the Steam license explicitly allows for third parties to repackage it to work on other platforms. In the event that their is an actual incompatibility, you can always have two versions of whatever dependency installed on the system.

Yes, I run it on Debian testing (with multiarch packages). I installed it through dpkg without a problem.

It's available in Debian's sid/non-free repositories, so yes.

I used to see occasional, unexpected reboots (crashes?) when I had Linux Mint Cinnamon on two of my laptops. So, I switched to Crunchbang on one and Linux Mint Debian Edition on the other; they're lightweight, simple and rock solid.

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