Debian used to be so good. What happened!? ( lemmy.world )

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do they even need busybox if the base install already comes with full gnu coreutils? I remember Debian as the distro that Just Wroks(TM), when did it all go so wrong? Is anyone else here having similar issues, or am I doing something wrong?

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Debian is as great as it's ever been.

pastermil ,

Never had issues due to 'outdated' packages myself, but then again, I wasn't into the latest & greatest.

I mean, you're always free to choose something else instead of bitching.

Samsy ,

I manage over 40 Debian clients in production use. All are managed with ansible. It's the easiest time in my sysadmin time ever.

My own systems are fedora and Debian unstable. Why? Because I test upcoming changes and features. And think how it would be if all 40 clients run on unstable or fedora, every day updates of 20-60 packages for nothing the user would care about.

Debian stable is my hero.

RedDoozer ,

Debian stable and flatpaks, I don't see all the fuss

nexussapphire ,

Why does the installer still explode sometimes when I use it on my computers. I use it on my mother's computer or our movie server and it works fine.

Maybe it just eats shit when it sees a btrfs partition or something. Nothing against Debian but I tried to install Debian testing weekly and it just refused to install on my system 76 laptop. After flashing arch on my USB drive to wipe the disk I just said fuck it and installed arch on my laptop again. I haven't had any issues with arch since I've installed it on my desktop five years ago. If arch blows up on my laptop I'll try Debian again.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

TL;DR

You want Debian stable with either back ports or containers. On desktop flatpak is your friend. Also do not add extra repos.

Honestly there is little reason to not use flatpak for web browsers. If you want packages from Fedora or other distros you can use Distrobox with podman as the back end.

Olap , (Bearbeitet )

Arch is where the cool kids put in the work these days. Their philosophy of downstream packages untouched results in fewer problems and easier maintenance. Why would anyone be a package maintainer for Debian? It's a thankless task, and hard

EddyBot ,

the work amount of backporting fixes which ARE already fixed in newer versions is also insane

thats one of the reason why Arch Linux sticks to stable upstream versions, backporting is just not feasable on smaller teams

gbin ,

I have been an Arch user for years now and anytime I touch a debian based distro it is such a headache: weird patched packages that don't compile anything past or present, insta dependency hell with PPAs, package names of 200 characters because apt doesn't have a good way to represent metadata... It made me a strong believer that trying to fight the bit rot and stick to the old stuff is counterproductive: a consistent head based development with a good community fixing bugs super quickly results in less hours of work fighting the paleolithic era dependencies, safer (as security fixes are faster to get in, packages are foreign to hackers and constantly changing etc), easier to find documentation as you don't need to dig into history to find which option existed or not, recent stuff is also easier to support for the developers of the various packages as it is fresh in their minds. Another point is to look at it from a tech debt lens: either you fix your stuff to work with current deps now or you just accumulate tech debt for the next engineer to fix in a way larger and combining a mountain of breakages in the future that of course IT and SREs will never want to do until the 15y old software is a disaster of security issues...

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Kali: I have no such weakness!

trips and falls on postgres upgrade

mariusafa ,

Debian testing is complelty okay. If you want to have the most up to date security use apt to grab sid security updates. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

lemmyvore ,

I mean they can still be broken, especially if you mix Sid into it.

debil ,

The fix comes to sid first. (Not counting experimental.) The right way to do it is to run mixed testing/unstable with apt-pinning so that nothing gets pulled from unstable unless spcifically requested.

That said, stable with Firefox from Mozilla's site and Neovim built from sources and gpack'd into deb package runs perfectly fine with much less hassle.

rc__buggy , (Bearbeitet )

Huh? Install testing or sid?

The Debian way is to install stable then change your sources.list to either testing or unstable.

I call shenanigans.

edit: what version was Stable using before 11Jun? 'cause it's 115.12.0esr-1 right now.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Thats not a good idea unless you do a proper upgrade (dist upgrade or similar)

It is easier to use the testing iso

rc__buggy ,

the wiki must be out of date then

Anonymo , (Bearbeitet )

You can try this:

https://siduction.org/

Even has BTRFS setup with Snapper (or Timeshift maybe) and nala is an option.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/05/siduction_2022_1/ Overview.

akincisor ,
@akincisor@sh.itjust.works avatar

I have been using unstable on desktop for at least 15 years. Every time a new stable was released that would cause a month of just staying off updates till things stabilized. Recently it's not even had that issue.

I've had to pin a package or two in that time, but unstable has been rock solid otherwise. I even run it on my server.

kuneho ,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

Debian was always like this.

muhyb ,

Ever considered LMDE? Best of both worlds if you ask me.

iopq ,

What's why we have NixOS. The unstable channel is more stable than most other distros and when it's not, you just roll back

onlinepersona ,

Ctrl+F "NixOS"

Anytime stability is mentioned somebody has to chirp up with NixOS. It's the law.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Atlas48 ,
@Atlas48@ttrpg.network avatar

"I use NixOS, btw"

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

What if you just get your browser using their own repositories or flatpak? 🌈

CrypticCoffee ,

Or there is OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is up to date, and stable...

pastermil ,

Tried the Tumbleweed. It's anything but stable.

CrypticCoffee ,

As someone who has used it for a few years. Incorrect. I had one upgrade issue (from KDE 5 to 6). Other than that. Smooth. For the Plasma upgrade, just change to default them before upgrade and upgrade from command line, not terminal window.

prunerye ,

Stable, in this context, just means "point release". If you meant "doesn't break", that describes most rolling release distros.

...unless you've used KDE in the last month. Holy cow, just let me alt-tab into a fullscreen window without throwing a fit.

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