18 ms·

Debian 10 “Buster” Released

584 points by thekyle 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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gjsman-1000 7y ago
...and Wayland is the DEFAULT? Things must have gotten better quite quickly.
- teddyh 7y ago
  As I understand it, it was mostly a technical result of Gnome being the default desktop, and Gnome defaulting to Wayland.
  - earenndil 7y ago
    I doubt it; they already maintain patchsets for a lot of their packages, and one to change what gnome defaults to would be trivial. This was a deliberate move.
    - teddyh 7y ago
      You can only see it as a “move” if you consider Debian to be a single reasoning entity. But consider: the person making such a patchset would be the Gnome maintainers, and they would not really have an incentive to do so; Gnome upstream probably changed the default for a reason, and the maintainers of the Debian Gnome package, being voluntary maintainers, probably are philosophically aligned with Gnome upstream. The rest of Debian, like the package maintainer who chooses what Desktop Environment should be the default, can not make such a change to the Gnome package without a quite adversarial process involving the Technical Committee, and in practice this process is rarely used, and even when used, rarely successful. Therefore, it is the expected result that Debian should follow the upstream Gnome into using Wayland.
  - beefhash 7y ago
    I'm honestly astounded by how much fallout is generated by GNOME alone: GNOME strongly integrating with systemd pushing systemd itself[1] onto major distributions, now GNOME forcing Wayland. Hell, RHEL even dropped KDE support entirely in version 8. I'm not saying change is inherently bad, but I'm amazed how much change is caused by a single project. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00578.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00578.html
    - dependenttypes 7y ago
      GNOME is not even that good even, not from a programming perspective (glib/gobject/gtk hell) nor from a usability perspective (features being removed left and right, high memory usage, etc). I personally think that tiling WMs do it way better, but even things like openbox and KDE are just more usable than GNOME. I am surprised that it is still the default in so many distros, something related to tradition i presume?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - abacadaba 7y ago
        > something related to tradition i presume? If only there were some sort of (M) Advanced Traditional Environment they could default to instead.. disclaimer: i probably haven't given any recent gnome version a fair shot
- nextos 7y ago
  The problem with Wayland right now is that most (tiling) window managers need a very significant effort to be ported from X11.
  - snazz 7y ago
    Maybe sircmpwn could comment on this: Could wlroots (originally for Sway) make the transition process easier for other tiling window mangers wanting to port to Wayland?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      Tremendously so, yes, but it's still going to be a lot of work.
    - new_realist 7y ago
      Personally I’m waiting for a tiling Wayland WM that supports NVIDIA.
      - thristian 7y ago
        Effectively, you're waiting for NVIDIA to implement the same APIs every other Linux GPU driver uses. You may be waiting a very long time.
      - pabs3 7y ago
        Sway (Wayland equivalent of i3) works with the open source nouveau drivers, which seem to work quite well for some folks.
      - iforgotpassword 7y ago
        Wait. So I haven't used Wayland at all yet but why would the graphics driver need to have support for a tiling WM? isn't that in a whole different later and shouldn't matter at all? Does NVIDIAs driver has any special code to make i3 work on X11 but missing code to make sway work on Wayland?
        7y ago
- BearOso 7y ago
  It’s still not ready, especially the KDE and GNOME situations. Things just aren’t very reliable. Mouse events are dropped and things like menus respond inconsistently. The XWayland layer doesn’t work smoothly, so X11 games and browsers aren’t very performant. Without that, there’s no transition layer, so it’s a cold-turkey jump to Wayland applications, of which there aren’t many. I think starting fresh from a Weston or wlroots base is the only way we’re going to get decent desktop environments. GNOME and KDE are “translating” the X11 stuff over to Wayland methodology, but that’s not going very quickly. It’s great that Debian is leaving the old X11 within arms reach. This is a very pragmatic way of pushing Wayland a bit while not screwing over the users.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    I don't think you'll have much luck with Weston, it's not really designed to be used as a base (libweston is tacked on and the devs acknowledge that it's not great).
  - malaxii 7y ago
    I've been using Wayland daily for over a year now, and have noticed none of these problems.
- yyyk 7y ago
  If I'm reading the announcement right, it's the default for GNOME alone, which makes sense: GNOME now defaults to Wayland and the other desktops default to X, Debian has no reason to second-guess them. Worse, changing the defaults in this area would be a fork in all but name.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  As a random sidenote, I find it very interesting that Wayland has pretty much all the same architectural decisions as Mac OS X 18 years later. Convergent evolution. It seems in general like the Linux world is a bit more stubborn to change.
snvzz 7y ago
I notice m68k is not part of the release.
- ashleyn 7y ago
  m68k was discontinued with Etch in 2007.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Hasn't been for a while. The last release to include official m68k support was 4.0 (etch). From a practical standpoint, m68k is old to the point that it doesn't seem practical to run any kind of modern Linux system on it anymore. The last new processor in the family (the 68060) was released in 1994, and ran at 75 MHz.
  - snvzz 7y ago
    Even if not tier 1 or whatever, I still sort of expected it to be there, as the port certainly exists and is still alive.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      It's "there", it's just not official anymore. AFAICT, Debian has no such thing as different "tiers" for official ports, everything official is at "tier 1" at least wrt. official support (LTS is not wholly 'official' and may skip some architectures).
      - snvzz 7y ago
        Right. I'm getting it confused with Netbsd.
- pabs3 7y ago
  m68k is still kept alive as an unofficial port so you can run Debian unstable if you have m68k hardware.
bitmadness 7y ago
I used to run Debian, but I switched to Fedora a few years ago and haven't looked back. Fedora is always sleek and up-to-date, unlike Debian, which due to its outdated packages always ends up looking like the plain step-sister. I also strongly prefer DNF to apt. With that being said, they both play crucial roles in the Linux ecosystem - Debian being the base for Ubuntu and Mint, and Fedora being the distribution which upstreams the most code.
- hlieberman 7y ago
  Running Debian testing is generally the practice I recommend on systems which are single-user, like desktops and laptops. It's quite stable and very up to date, except for a couple of months in the run-up to freeze. Disclaimer: I'm a Debian developer.
  - h43z 7y ago
    The problem with testing is you may wait for security updates much longer.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    I've been told before that this advice isn't appropriate for anyone who isn't a Debian developer. Things can break and testing may not get important security patches until a while after unstable and stable.
    - hlieberman 7y ago
      The security patches is certainly a concern (though testing-security does exist, albeit not with the coverage of security-updates from stable). In my experience, testing is quite stable for 95% of packages; I can only think of a few instances in the last decade that testing has really broken my computer in a way that required me to break out my developer skills. More frequently, you'll find packages which can't be installed because they've been dropped from testing due to RC bugs -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing!
    - ohazi 7y ago
diehunde 7y ago
People that have used both Ubuntu and Debian, what are the cons of using Debian over Ubuntu? Also, which is the best supported desktop environment these days for Debian?
lossolo 7y ago
I run Debian everywhere, it's super stable, had machine that was running production jobs for almost 3 years without downtime (around 1000 days uptime) and it went down because of server power supply failure. Have plenty of machines with 1+ year of uptime.
- ohazi 7y ago
  I also run Debian (almost) everywhere. For those who want a rolling release, Debian testing is also surprisingly stable. One of my laptops has been on testing getting continuous updates for about 7 years now and still runs great.
  - _delirium 7y ago
    Even Debian unstable is reasonably stable for me (despite the name), comparable to other rolling-release distros I think. Really not-ready-to-ship stuff is uploaded to 'experimental' instead. The main precaution I take is having 'apt-listbugs' installed. It checks for any new high-severity bugs in the packages you're upgrading. You can take a look at them before deciding whether to upgrade, which occasionally helps avoid installing something broken. On servers I prefer Debian stable though. I like my mail server running unattended with only security upgrades, and rolling-release distros tend to introduce config-breaking changes exactly when I have the least time to deal with them.
    - ohazi 7y ago
      You're describing my setup exactly. Stable for servers, testing for personal machines, with apt-listbugs installed (the install guide recommended this at one point, not sure if it still does). I also ran unstable for about two years and, like you said, it was fine. Testing is usually only a few weeks behind unstable though, so if your primary motivation is to have relatively recent software and a rolling release so that you never have to stop everything and deal with full system upgrade breakages, then testing is great.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  I would argue that’s mostly due to the Linux kernel being stable. Not to take anything away from Debian the hard work of the maintainers and contributed of Debian.
epynonymous 7y ago
how long before ubuntu switches over to this? i don't even know if ubuntu has forked from debian or it's pretty much the same, but with different package management?
- thekyle 7y ago
  I believe that Ubuntu gets their packages from Debian unstable not stable. So the latest Ubuntu most likely already has very similar packages (if not slightly newer) to this.
- ohazi 7y ago
  Ubuntu is cut from Debian testing, not stable. Testing uses a rolling release, so any recent Ubuntu will already have most of the changes that went into Buster today.
- andrewshadura 7y ago
  Ubuntu is based on packages from testing+unstable, where the packages get automatically or manually synced from.
- epynonymous 7y ago
  thanks all. does anyone have any experience with debian in production for hosting restful api backends? i use ubuntu almost exclusively, but i always see something about it being derived from (debian) 'stretch' or whatever so was wondering what i'd typically get in terms of benefit compared to ubuntu.
ebg13 7y ago
I love how it's 2019 and installing Debian still requires a PhD in forensic psychology to find the download link.
- infinity0 7y ago
  You're still thinking like a passive consumer, you won't get very far changing the world like that.
- 29athrowaway 7y ago
  Debian network install (amd64) is a safe choice.
  - ebg13 7y ago
    How many clicks does it take to find that? Scratch that. How do you find that without knowing exactly where it is already? What do you click on? Where is it on the page? What and how much do you have to ignore before you finally get to the part at every stage that's actually relevant to the breadcrumb trail? [edit] The "click Get Debian" responses are absolutely killing me. OH YES AND THEN WHAT? How many paragraphs of jargon do you have to casually slide past? How many links do you have to _not_ click? How do you know which links to actually click vs all the ones that you're supposed to not click? The definition of "free"? The "installation manual"? Will the small image be incomplete? What's the difference between a small CD and a tiny CD? What's the difference between a USB stick and a "flexible" USB stick? Can't I put a DVD on a USB stick? I swear this kind of UX aspect blindness is why people hate SWEs.
    - allset_ 7y ago
      It's on the Getting Debian page, so two clicks total.
      - phosphophyllite 7y ago
        How can I find "unofficial" testing image with non-free drivers?
nathancahill 7y ago
From Node 4 to Node 10.15. Huge upgrade in JS land.
- M2Ys4U 7y ago
  Were they were any people _not_ using alternative repositories for Node? If I'm deploying node to a server the first thing I do is set the system up to use nodesource's repos.
ohiovr 7y ago
I upgraded a couple days ago from stretch and was happy with the no hassle experience. I got newer nvidea drivers and cuda 10.1 and finally managed to figure out how to get nvenc encoding to work. I installed it fresh on a virtual machine for a server project I am working on and was glad to find all my scripts work as expected (about 100 of them)
charlesdaniels 7y ago
Congratulations to the Debian team on their new release! I will certainly be upgrading to it soon enough. Just for fun, I downloaded the ISO shortly after it went up and recorded my first impressions of using it on the happy path with the default GNOME environment. I would consider myself a technical user, but I use GNOME rarely and am not familiar with it personally. * I didn't notice anything out of place with the Wayland switch. I haven't tested suspend/resume/hibernate/external monitors yet though. Personally, I won't be using Wayland on my main machine once I update that as I'm a CWM user, and Wayland support probably isn't every going to happen for that. * My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`). * GNOME apparently does not support configuring multiple wifi adapters, which was a problem since I had intended to use a USB adapter to download the nonfree drivers for my internal adapter, but GNOME did not have a menu to configure them separately. * The problems that GNOME 3.X has always had continue to be present -- chiefly the UI scale is too large on low-res screens (the machine I was testing with has a 1366x768 display), and graphics performance continues to disappoint (animations stutter very noticeably on the "search" screen for example, this was on a 2nd gen mobile i7). * The much-touted software center seemed to have several polish issues. The first time I launched it it threw a bunch of inscrutable errors and didn't work until I re-booted the machine. It still threw inscrutable errors, but worked after this. Lists of software would take 60s+ to download (render? not sure what part was slowing it down). From the perspective of a technical user, I don't care about any of these. They either affect software I don't use, or could be fixed easily enough. However, if the objective is to support non-technical users who don't have the knowledge/time/interest to troubleshoot, I feel that this release falls short. For reference, the hardware used to test was a ThinkPad X220 with a 2nd gen i7, 12GB RAM, and an SSD.
- ohazi 7y ago
  > * My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`). The default profile for users (/etc/profile) hasn't included sbin paths for the entire time that I've used Debian, which always seemed a little weird to me, since there are definitely binaries in there that normal users can still use (e.g. lsmod).
xmichael999 7y ago
Great job Debian team, personally I can't wait for the Devuan fork based on this release.
deleted 7y ago
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simonw 7y ago
PostgreSQL 11 and Python 3.7.2 in Debian Stable supported for the next 5 years? Nice!
- juststeve 7y ago
  Rust and go as well.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  emacs 26 finally.
efiecho 7y ago
I'm personally looking more forward to the Devuan "Beowulf" release. Maybe this will happen soon now that Debian "Buster" is released.
_delirium 7y ago
Some interesting bits in the What's New [1] part of the release notes, besides just package updates. Pulling out a few: * UEFI Secure Boot support * AppArmor now installed by default, with profiles for various programs * APT can optionally be sandboxed with seccomp-bpf (but not yet enabled by default) * nftables replaces iptables as the network filter * GNOME/Wayland by default [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/c...
paulcarroty 7y ago
Don't like the speculation 'old software is stable', sounds like cheap marketing. If any software was released X years ago nothing doing this old release "better" or "stable", bugs happens everywhere.
- ris 7y ago
  That's not the sort of "stable" that is meant by "debian stable". It's "stable" as in "doesn't change". Things shouldn't break randomly every couple of months. You shouldn't wake up one morning and realize that one of your applications needs to be ported to a new API to keep working. If something works today, it should still work in 6 months, while still receiving security fixes. You should be able to reliably narrow down weird bugs without it becoming a heisenbug due to the shifting sands of your underlying software distribution.
shmerl 7y ago
Congratulations! Hopefully libdrm will start moving soon, so Mesa master will be buildable again.
awill 7y ago
I wonder if the timing of this is significant. For people wanting a rock solid, free, stable distro, Debian and CentOS are two of the top choices. Even though RHEL 8 released, CentOS 8 still isn't out. I'm running CentOS 7 on my server, and it's getting long in the tooth. Debian 10 releasing before CentOS 8 will likely result in me giving it a spin.
- petre 7y ago
  OpenSuSE is great as well. Stable, the Leap release is reasonably fresh with 18 month support window and they have a rolling release.
camdenlock 7y ago
I do hope Debian will run well on emerging privsec-focused hardware like Librem...
- _delirium 7y ago
  It looks like everything except bluetooth works out of the box: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%2013 https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%201...
  - als0 7y ago
    And worth noting that enabling Bluetooth is as simple as installing the firmware-atheros non-free package.
phosphophyllite 7y ago
Will someday debian authors and die hard fans understand that old libc and old Firefox or Gimp are different and one really can mean stable and another can be just outdated? Is it possible that desktop should be developed in other manner than server?
- mruts 7y ago
  This is why I switched to Arch. Debian is just too conservative.
  - unwrap 7y ago
    Ah yes, Arch certainly is much better. I've had enough to do with Arch when they totally borked my workflow three times in a row in a couple of months. One of the issues was rebuilding all of the Qt5 libraries without testing any of their dependents. All Qt5 applications simply stopped working. I don't blame them though, one of the maintainers was supporting like, 3000 packages? I don't recall the exact number, but it was an impossible amount of work for a single individual. This strongly implies there was zero QA for these packages (an he really was doing it himself, it was not a front for an organization.)
- darkpuma 7y ago
  I think most Debian desktop users pull things like their browser from Sid.
  - raegis 7y ago
    Actually, Debian stable uses Firefox ESR, which is updated roughly once a year. I've used Debian exclusively on the Desktop since around Etch/Lenny, and never see the need to update my browser often.
    - qplex 7y ago
      It's worth noting that Debian backports security fixes for firefox-esr and these come in more often than once a year[0]. [0] https://www.debian.org/security/2019/ https://www.debian.org/security/2019/
yaantc 7y ago
As in all threads on Debian stable, I see criticisms that stable software is stale / too old. That really misses the point: this is not a bug, it's a feature of stable! Stability doesn't only mean "lack of (big) bugs", it also mean that it's dependable: it won't change under you, and what is inside is well understood (including limitations). This require using mature enough software. In any non-trivial piece of software novelty will brings exciting new features but also regressions in some cases. There's an inherent trade-off between freshness and stability in this sense. Debian stable is made for stability in the full sense, like a Red Hat. If one prefers something more recent, but with more frequent changes, it's fine. Either use a distro with more frequent releases (e.g.: regular Ubuntu or Fedora) or even a rolling one like Arch, of Debian testing (sort of) or unstable. There's room for all of this, it's just different trade-offs. Lastly, as I've said elsewhere it's possible to mix and match. One rarely needs the latest in all, and it's possible to use stable as a base to avoid problems, and add fresh versions on top for only the software one care about. With the various languages package managers and flatpack/snapd this is becoming very easy. For some it may be a better trade-off than moving to a rolling distro.
- nsomaru 7y ago
  Agreed, although that last point has a few caveats, especially with regards to Debian and apt - https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
  - cbolton 7y ago
    That page actually lists flatpak and snapd as recommended solutions...
    - elagost 7y ago
      I use a ton of flatpaks on my system and don't notice the difference between them and "real" packages. I use Signal, Telegram, a few games, and the Steam flatpak, which is a great way to use Steam without enabling multilib on Arch. On an Ubuntu system, snaps works great as well.
- 7y ago
crustycoder 7y ago
Turning on AppArmor by default was a mistake. It completely broke Firefox, because my homedir is accessed via a symlink and AppArmor refused to let Firefox write its lockfile via a symlink. The diagnostics are pretty much non-existent and it took me the best part of a day to figure out what the problem was. The AppArmor docs say it's only really intended to be used with system daemons, having user apps like Firefox use it is just asking for trouble. I disabled it via grub and uninstalled out all the userland components as well.
perlgeek 7y ago
Hah, we just got rid of our last Jessie box in our $work setup (with the exception of some database boxes that aren't part of the regular upgrade cycle). I hope this next dist upgrade goes much quicker, due to the automations we've built (config management with Ansible, Continuous Delivery).
Tepix 7y ago
Does Debian 10 work on the Asus Tinkerboard as-is? Or do i need a special version? I look forward to running it!
- Havoc 7y ago
  It'll probably run but hw accel will be a pain. I'd rather go for armbian.
  - Tepix 7y ago
    I don't need HDMI, I just want to run some network services on it. Looks like Armbian Buster is alread out: https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/ https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/
    - Havoc 7y ago
      Lucky for you. The tinkerboard is actually pretty nice gear aside from the god forsaken hw accel. Keep an eye on the temp though - seems to run hot. I managed to get mine to behave without a fan by adding significant thermal mass. (~pound of copper)
tannhaeuser 7y ago
From my anecdata, I'm seeing Debian growing into the role that Red Hat used to have in the enterprise, on VPSs, and as a stable build server requiring older gcc and other backports etc., with Ubuntu being the the most used O/S by developers now (more than Mac OS, let alone Windows, at my recent customers). I'm quite ok with it, as it keeps the door open for Devuan to get rid of SystemD as RH looses influence. With their focus on stable, I wonder if Debian could collect maintenance contributions (code or cash) from enterprises.
- fanf2 7y ago
  I have been running Stretch without systemd very happily, and I believe that should still work with Buster, at least for server uses. (It is harder to avoid Gnome and systemd on desktop setups with dynamic network / power / device reconfiguration.)
- RidingPegasus 7y ago
  Always interested in why exactly systemd is bad? There's a lot of negative PR and not much evidence of why people shouldn't use it. Comes across as like the same recommendations of "don't use chrome, use this fork instead", one that's run by a tiny team of people who face very little consequences for messing up.
  - MozzieW 7y ago
    I'd disagree, there's a huge amount of evidence not to use it, mainly in the form of thousands of forum and bug tracking posts with very genuine complaints and issues with systemd. Many of those posts have been met with ignorance from the developers, even resorting to "it's not a bug" when it clearly is. Systemd has been pushed into distros based on improvement of boot times (their PR), not as a basis of a stable replacement of an init system. There were no problems of existing init systems to resolve, and SSD's have made the boot times pointless. My fully-loaded Devuan install boots 3 seconds quicker than Mint, Solus or Fedora. Genuine outstanding issues highlighted in the forums are things like not being able to get unit files to start services at boot up, difficulty in finding start up errors due to the order of other services starting, errors not showing up in logs and untraceable boot delays. These are not made up, just take a look at forum threads tagged with systemd. It has also become much more than an init system. This has resulted in bigger dependency issues, in turn resulting in not being able to install some applications purely because of a dependency on systemd somewhere down the chain. On non-systemd distros applications don't care which init system you use. It's not negative PR, it's real users having real issues that have had something pushed on to them. For systemd's original portrayed purpose there is no reason devs couldn't have spent their time creating configuration utilities for the existing inits. At least when something breaks on the established ones, there is only an init system to look at.
turrini 7y ago
Is there wireguard support?
pleasant_truthz 7y ago
So can anybody explain why did they decide to split Python into python3 and python3-pip packages? Pip is not some random third-party library, it's part of the official installation that you can get from python.org.
aorth 7y ago
Great! Now just waiting for official tarsnap and nginx.org builds so I can upgrade my servers. MariaDB already has Buster builds in their deb repositories.
- cperciva 7y ago
  Doesn't the existing Tarsnap package work?
  - chrismsnz 7y ago
    Not for me - seems it depends on libssl1.0 and buster ships 1.1
    - cperciva 7y ago
      Oh, right. Try the experimental packages: http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01557.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01557.html
jimmyhoughjr 7y ago
yeah but npm is broken. Software update is broken because something was changed from testing to staging. Seems they didn't even test their first time setup.

584 points by thekyle 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gjsman-1000 7y ago

...and Wayland is the DEFAULT? Things must have gotten better quite quickly.

teddyh 7y ago
As I understand it, it was mostly a technical result of Gnome being the default desktop, and Gnome defaulting to Wayland.
- earenndil 7y ago
  I doubt it; they already maintain patchsets for a lot of their packages, and one to change what gnome defaults to would be trivial. This was a deliberate move.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    You can only see it as a “move” if you consider Debian to be a single reasoning entity. But consider: the person making such a patchset would be the Gnome maintainers, and they would not really have an incentive to do so; Gnome upstream probably changed the default for a reason, and the maintainers of the Debian Gnome package, being voluntary maintainers, probably are philosophically aligned with Gnome upstream. The rest of Debian, like the package maintainer who chooses what Desktop Environment should be the default, can not make such a change to the Gnome package without a quite adversarial process involving the Technical Committee, and in practice this process is rarely used, and even when used, rarely successful. Therefore, it is the expected result that Debian should follow the upstream Gnome into using Wayland.
- beefhash 7y ago
  I'm honestly astounded by how much fallout is generated by GNOME alone: GNOME strongly integrating with systemd pushing systemd itself[1] onto major distributions, now GNOME forcing Wayland. Hell, RHEL even dropped KDE support entirely in version 8. I'm not saying change is inherently bad, but I'm amazed how much change is caused by a single project. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00578.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/10/msg00578.html
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    GNOME is not even that good even, not from a programming perspective (glib/gobject/gtk hell) nor from a usability perspective (features being removed left and right, high memory usage, etc). I personally think that tiling WMs do it way better, but even things like openbox and KDE are just more usable than GNOME. I am surprised that it is still the default in so many distros, something related to tradition i presume?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - abacadaba 7y ago
      > something related to tradition i presume? If only there were some sort of (M) Advanced Traditional Environment they could default to instead.. disclaimer: i probably haven't given any recent gnome version a fair shot
nextos 7y ago
The problem with Wayland right now is that most (tiling) window managers need a very significant effort to be ported from X11.
- snazz 7y ago
  Maybe sircmpwn could comment on this: Could wlroots (originally for Sway) make the transition process easier for other tiling window mangers wanting to port to Wayland?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Tremendously so, yes, but it's still going to be a lot of work.
  - new_realist 7y ago
    Personally I’m waiting for a tiling Wayland WM that supports NVIDIA.
    - thristian 7y ago
      Effectively, you're waiting for NVIDIA to implement the same APIs every other Linux GPU driver uses. You may be waiting a very long time.
    - pabs3 7y ago
      Sway (Wayland equivalent of i3) works with the open source nouveau drivers, which seem to work quite well for some folks.
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      Wait. So I haven't used Wayland at all yet but why would the graphics driver need to have support for a tiling WM? isn't that in a whole different later and shouldn't matter at all? Does NVIDIAs driver has any special code to make i3 work on X11 but missing code to make sway work on Wayland?
      - 7y ago
BearOso 7y ago
It’s still not ready, especially the KDE and GNOME situations. Things just aren’t very reliable. Mouse events are dropped and things like menus respond inconsistently. The XWayland layer doesn’t work smoothly, so X11 games and browsers aren’t very performant. Without that, there’s no transition layer, so it’s a cold-turkey jump to Wayland applications, of which there aren’t many. I think starting fresh from a Weston or wlroots base is the only way we’re going to get decent desktop environments. GNOME and KDE are “translating” the X11 stuff over to Wayland methodology, but that’s not going very quickly. It’s great that Debian is leaving the old X11 within arms reach. This is a very pragmatic way of pushing Wayland a bit while not screwing over the users.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  I don't think you'll have much luck with Weston, it's not really designed to be used as a base (libweston is tacked on and the devs acknowledge that it's not great).
- malaxii 7y ago
  I've been using Wayland daily for over a year now, and have noticed none of these problems.
yyyk 7y ago
If I'm reading the announcement right, it's the default for GNOME alone, which makes sense: GNOME now defaults to Wayland and the other desktops default to X, Debian has no reason to second-guess them. Worse, changing the defaults in this area would be a fork in all but name.
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
As a random sidenote, I find it very interesting that Wayland has pretty much all the same architectural decisions as Mac OS X 18 years later. Convergent evolution. It seems in general like the Linux world is a bit more stubborn to change.

snvzz 7y ago

I notice m68k is not part of the release.

ashleyn 7y ago
m68k was discontinued with Etch in 2007.
duskwuff 7y ago
Hasn't been for a while. The last release to include official m68k support was 4.0 (etch). From a practical standpoint, m68k is old to the point that it doesn't seem practical to run any kind of modern Linux system on it anymore. The last new processor in the family (the 68060) was released in 1994, and ran at 75 MHz.
- snvzz 7y ago
  Even if not tier 1 or whatever, I still sort of expected it to be there, as the port certainly exists and is still alive.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    It's "there", it's just not official anymore. AFAICT, Debian has no such thing as different "tiers" for official ports, everything official is at "tier 1" at least wrt. official support (LTS is not wholly 'official' and may skip some architectures).
    - snvzz 7y ago
      Right. I'm getting it confused with Netbsd.
pabs3 7y ago
m68k is still kept alive as an unofficial port so you can run Debian unstable if you have m68k hardware.

bitmadness 7y ago

I used to run Debian, but I switched to Fedora a few years ago and haven't looked back. Fedora is always sleek and up-to-date, unlike Debian, which due to its outdated packages always ends up looking like the plain step-sister. I also strongly prefer DNF to apt. With that being said, they both play crucial roles in the Linux ecosystem - Debian being the base for Ubuntu and Mint, and Fedora being the distribution which upstreams the most code.

hlieberman 7y ago
Running Debian testing is generally the practice I recommend on systems which are single-user, like desktops and laptops. It's quite stable and very up to date, except for a couple of months in the run-up to freeze. Disclaimer: I'm a Debian developer.
- h43z 7y ago
  The problem with testing is you may wait for security updates much longer.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  I've been told before that this advice isn't appropriate for anyone who isn't a Debian developer. Things can break and testing may not get important security patches until a while after unstable and stable.
  - hlieberman 7y ago
    The security patches is certainly a concern (though testing-security does exist, albeit not with the coverage of security-updates from stable). In my experience, testing is quite stable for 95% of packages; I can only think of a few instances in the last decade that testing has really broken my computer in a way that required me to break out my developer skills. More frequently, you'll find packages which can't be installed because they've been dropped from testing due to RC bugs -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing!
  - ohazi 7y ago

diehunde 7y ago

People that have used both Ubuntu and Debian, what are the cons of using Debian over Ubuntu? Also, which is the best supported desktop environment these days for Debian?

lossolo 7y ago

I run Debian everywhere, it's super stable, had machine that was running production jobs for almost 3 years without downtime (around 1000 days uptime) and it went down because of server power supply failure. Have plenty of machines with 1+ year of uptime.

ohazi 7y ago
I also run Debian (almost) everywhere. For those who want a rolling release, Debian testing is also surprisingly stable. One of my laptops has been on testing getting continuous updates for about 7 years now and still runs great.
- _delirium 7y ago
  Even Debian unstable is reasonably stable for me (despite the name), comparable to other rolling-release distros I think. Really not-ready-to-ship stuff is uploaded to 'experimental' instead. The main precaution I take is having 'apt-listbugs' installed. It checks for any new high-severity bugs in the packages you're upgrading. You can take a look at them before deciding whether to upgrade, which occasionally helps avoid installing something broken. On servers I prefer Debian stable though. I like my mail server running unattended with only security upgrades, and rolling-release distros tend to introduce config-breaking changes exactly when I have the least time to deal with them.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    You're describing my setup exactly. Stable for servers, testing for personal machines, with apt-listbugs installed (the install guide recommended this at one point, not sure if it still does). I also ran unstable for about two years and, like you said, it was fine. Testing is usually only a few weeks behind unstable though, so if your primary motivation is to have relatively recent software and a rolling release so that you never have to stop everything and deal with full system upgrade breakages, then testing is great.
bamboozled 7y ago
I would argue that’s mostly due to the Linux kernel being stable. Not to take anything away from Debian the hard work of the maintainers and contributed of Debian.

epynonymous 7y ago

how long before ubuntu switches over to this? i don't even know if ubuntu has forked from debian or it's pretty much the same, but with different package management?

thekyle 7y ago
I believe that Ubuntu gets their packages from Debian unstable not stable. So the latest Ubuntu most likely already has very similar packages (if not slightly newer) to this.
ohazi 7y ago
Ubuntu is cut from Debian testing, not stable. Testing uses a rolling release, so any recent Ubuntu will already have most of the changes that went into Buster today.
andrewshadura 7y ago
Ubuntu is based on packages from testing+unstable, where the packages get automatically or manually synced from.
epynonymous 7y ago
thanks all. does anyone have any experience with debian in production for hosting restful api backends? i use ubuntu almost exclusively, but i always see something about it being derived from (debian) 'stretch' or whatever so was wondering what i'd typically get in terms of benefit compared to ubuntu.

ebg13 7y ago

I love how it's 2019 and installing Debian still requires a PhD in forensic psychology to find the download link.

infinity0 7y ago
You're still thinking like a passive consumer, you won't get very far changing the world like that.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Debian network install (amd64) is a safe choice.
- ebg13 7y ago
  How many clicks does it take to find that? Scratch that. How do you find that without knowing exactly where it is already? What do you click on? Where is it on the page? What and how much do you have to ignore before you finally get to the part at every stage that's actually relevant to the breadcrumb trail? [edit] The "click Get Debian" responses are absolutely killing me. OH YES AND THEN WHAT? How many paragraphs of jargon do you have to casually slide past? How many links do you have to _not_ click? How do you know which links to actually click vs all the ones that you're supposed to not click? The definition of "free"? The "installation manual"? Will the small image be incomplete? What's the difference between a small CD and a tiny CD? What's the difference between a USB stick and a "flexible" USB stick? Can't I put a DVD on a USB stick? I swear this kind of UX aspect blindness is why people hate SWEs.
  - allset_ 7y ago
    It's on the Getting Debian page, so two clicks total.
    - phosphophyllite 7y ago
      How can I find "unofficial" testing image with non-free drivers?

nathancahill 7y ago

From Node 4 to Node 10.15. Huge upgrade in JS land.

M2Ys4U 7y ago
Were they were any people _not_ using alternative repositories for Node? If I'm deploying node to a server the first thing I do is set the system up to use nodesource's repos.

ohiovr 7y ago

I upgraded a couple days ago from stretch and was happy with the no hassle experience. I got newer nvidea drivers and cuda 10.1 and finally managed to figure out how to get nvenc encoding to work. I installed it fresh on a virtual machine for a server project I am working on and was glad to find all my scripts work as expected (about 100 of them)

charlesdaniels 7y ago

Congratulations to the Debian team on their new release! I will certainly be upgrading to it soon enough. Just for fun, I downloaded the ISO shortly after it went up and recorded my first impressions of using it on the happy path with the default GNOME environment. I would consider myself a technical user, but I use GNOME rarely and am not familiar with it personally. * I didn't notice anything out of place with the Wayland switch. I haven't tested suspend/resume/hibernate/external monitors yet though. Personally, I won't be using Wayland on my main machine once I update that as I'm a CWM user, and Wayland support probably isn't every going to happen for that. * My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`). * GNOME apparently does not support configuring multiple wifi adapters, which was a problem since I had intended to use a USB adapter to download the nonfree drivers for my internal adapter, but GNOME did not have a menu to configure them separately. * The problems that GNOME 3.X has always had continue to be present -- chiefly the UI scale is too large on low-res screens (the machine I was testing with has a 1366x768 display), and graphics performance continues to disappoint (animations stutter very noticeably on the "search" screen for example, this was on a 2nd gen mobile i7). * The much-touted software center seemed to have several polish issues. The first time I launched it it threw a bunch of inscrutable errors and didn't work until I re-booted the machine. It still threw inscrutable errors, but worked after this. Lists of software would take 60s+ to download (render? not sure what part was slowing it down). From the perspective of a technical user, I don't care about any of these. They either affect software I don't use, or could be fixed easily enough. However, if the objective is to support non-technical users who don't have the knowledge/time/interest to troubleshoot, I feel that this release falls short. For reference, the hardware used to test was a ThinkPad X220 with a 2nd gen i7, 12GB RAM, and an SSD.

ohazi 7y ago
> * My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`). The default profile for users (/etc/profile) hasn't included sbin paths for the entire time that I've used Debian, which always seemed a little weird to me, since there are definitely binaries in there that normal users can still use (e.g. lsmod).

xmichael999 7y ago

Great job Debian team, personally I can't wait for the Devuan fork based on this release.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

simonw 7y ago

PostgreSQL 11 and Python 3.7.2 in Debian Stable supported for the next 5 years? Nice!

juststeve 7y ago
Rust and go as well.
fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
emacs 26 finally.

efiecho 7y ago

I'm personally looking more forward to the Devuan "Beowulf" release. Maybe this will happen soon now that Debian "Buster" is released.

_delirium 7y ago

Some interesting bits in the What's New [1] part of the release notes, besides just package updates. Pulling out a few: * UEFI Secure Boot support * AppArmor now installed by default, with profiles for various programs * APT can optionally be sandboxed with seccomp-bpf (but not yet enabled by default) * nftables replaces iptables as the network filter * GNOME/Wayland by default [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/c...

paulcarroty 7y ago

Don't like the speculation 'old software is stable', sounds like cheap marketing. If any software was released X years ago nothing doing this old release "better" or "stable", bugs happens everywhere.

ris 7y ago
That's not the sort of "stable" that is meant by "debian stable". It's "stable" as in "doesn't change". Things shouldn't break randomly every couple of months. You shouldn't wake up one morning and realize that one of your applications needs to be ported to a new API to keep working. If something works today, it should still work in 6 months, while still receiving security fixes. You should be able to reliably narrow down weird bugs without it becoming a heisenbug due to the shifting sands of your underlying software distribution.

shmerl 7y ago

Congratulations! Hopefully libdrm will start moving soon, so Mesa master will be buildable again.

awill 7y ago

I wonder if the timing of this is significant. For people wanting a rock solid, free, stable distro, Debian and CentOS are two of the top choices. Even though RHEL 8 released, CentOS 8 still isn't out. I'm running CentOS 7 on my server, and it's getting long in the tooth. Debian 10 releasing before CentOS 8 will likely result in me giving it a spin.

petre 7y ago
OpenSuSE is great as well. Stable, the Leap release is reasonably fresh with 18 month support window and they have a rolling release.

camdenlock 7y ago

I do hope Debian will run well on emerging privsec-focused hardware like Librem...

_delirium 7y ago
It looks like everything except bluetooth works out of the box: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%2013 https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%201...
- als0 7y ago
  And worth noting that enabling Bluetooth is as simple as installing the firmware-atheros non-free package.

phosphophyllite 7y ago

Will someday debian authors and die hard fans understand that old libc and old Firefox or Gimp are different and one really can mean stable and another can be just outdated? Is it possible that desktop should be developed in other manner than server?

mruts 7y ago
This is why I switched to Arch. Debian is just too conservative.
- unwrap 7y ago
  Ah yes, Arch certainly is much better. I've had enough to do with Arch when they totally borked my workflow three times in a row in a couple of months. One of the issues was rebuilding all of the Qt5 libraries without testing any of their dependents. All Qt5 applications simply stopped working. I don't blame them though, one of the maintainers was supporting like, 3000 packages? I don't recall the exact number, but it was an impossible amount of work for a single individual. This strongly implies there was zero QA for these packages (an he really was doing it himself, it was not a front for an organization.)
darkpuma 7y ago
I think most Debian desktop users pull things like their browser from Sid.
- raegis 7y ago
  Actually, Debian stable uses Firefox ESR, which is updated roughly once a year. I've used Debian exclusively on the Desktop since around Etch/Lenny, and never see the need to update my browser often.
  - qplex 7y ago
    It's worth noting that Debian backports security fixes for firefox-esr and these come in more often than once a year[0]. [0] https://www.debian.org/security/2019/ https://www.debian.org/security/2019/

yaantc 7y ago

As in all threads on Debian stable, I see criticisms that stable software is stale / too old. That really misses the point: this is not a bug, it's a feature of stable! Stability doesn't only mean "lack of (big) bugs", it also mean that it's dependable: it won't change under you, and what is inside is well understood (including limitations). This require using mature enough software. In any non-trivial piece of software novelty will brings exciting new features but also regressions in some cases. There's an inherent trade-off between freshness and stability in this sense. Debian stable is made for stability in the full sense, like a Red Hat. If one prefers something more recent, but with more frequent changes, it's fine. Either use a distro with more frequent releases (e.g.: regular Ubuntu or Fedora) or even a rolling one like Arch, of Debian testing (sort of) or unstable. There's room for all of this, it's just different trade-offs. Lastly, as I've said elsewhere it's possible to mix and match. One rarely needs the latest in all, and it's possible to use stable as a base to avoid problems, and add fresh versions on top for only the software one care about. With the various languages package managers and flatpack/snapd this is becoming very easy. For some it may be a better trade-off than moving to a rolling distro.

nsomaru 7y ago
Agreed, although that last point has a few caveats, especially with regards to Debian and apt - https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
- cbolton 7y ago
  That page actually lists flatpak and snapd as recommended solutions...
  - elagost 7y ago
    I use a ton of flatpaks on my system and don't notice the difference between them and "real" packages. I use Signal, Telegram, a few games, and the Steam flatpak, which is a great way to use Steam without enabling multilib on Arch. On an Ubuntu system, snaps works great as well.
7y ago

crustycoder 7y ago

Turning on AppArmor by default was a mistake. It completely broke Firefox, because my homedir is accessed via a symlink and AppArmor refused to let Firefox write its lockfile via a symlink. The diagnostics are pretty much non-existent and it took me the best part of a day to figure out what the problem was. The AppArmor docs say it's only really intended to be used with system daemons, having user apps like Firefox use it is just asking for trouble. I disabled it via grub and uninstalled out all the userland components as well.

perlgeek 7y ago

Hah, we just got rid of our last Jessie box in our $work setup (with the exception of some database boxes that aren't part of the regular upgrade cycle). I hope this next dist upgrade goes much quicker, due to the automations we've built (config management with Ansible, Continuous Delivery).

Tepix 7y ago

Does Debian 10 work on the Asus Tinkerboard as-is? Or do i need a special version? I look forward to running it!

Havoc 7y ago
It'll probably run but hw accel will be a pain. I'd rather go for armbian.
- Tepix 7y ago
  I don't need HDMI, I just want to run some network services on it. Looks like Armbian Buster is alread out: https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/ https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Lucky for you. The tinkerboard is actually pretty nice gear aside from the god forsaken hw accel. Keep an eye on the temp though - seems to run hot. I managed to get mine to behave without a fan by adding significant thermal mass. (~pound of copper)

tannhaeuser 7y ago

From my anecdata, I'm seeing Debian growing into the role that Red Hat used to have in the enterprise, on VPSs, and as a stable build server requiring older gcc and other backports etc., with Ubuntu being the the most used O/S by developers now (more than Mac OS, let alone Windows, at my recent customers). I'm quite ok with it, as it keeps the door open for Devuan to get rid of SystemD as RH looses influence. With their focus on stable, I wonder if Debian could collect maintenance contributions (code or cash) from enterprises.

fanf2 7y ago
I have been running Stretch without systemd very happily, and I believe that should still work with Buster, at least for server uses. (It is harder to avoid Gnome and systemd on desktop setups with dynamic network / power / device reconfiguration.)
RidingPegasus 7y ago
Always interested in why exactly systemd is bad? There's a lot of negative PR and not much evidence of why people shouldn't use it. Comes across as like the same recommendations of "don't use chrome, use this fork instead", one that's run by a tiny team of people who face very little consequences for messing up.
- MozzieW 7y ago
  I'd disagree, there's a huge amount of evidence not to use it, mainly in the form of thousands of forum and bug tracking posts with very genuine complaints and issues with systemd. Many of those posts have been met with ignorance from the developers, even resorting to "it's not a bug" when it clearly is. Systemd has been pushed into distros based on improvement of boot times (their PR), not as a basis of a stable replacement of an init system. There were no problems of existing init systems to resolve, and SSD's have made the boot times pointless. My fully-loaded Devuan install boots 3 seconds quicker than Mint, Solus or Fedora. Genuine outstanding issues highlighted in the forums are things like not being able to get unit files to start services at boot up, difficulty in finding start up errors due to the order of other services starting, errors not showing up in logs and untraceable boot delays. These are not made up, just take a look at forum threads tagged with systemd. It has also become much more than an init system. This has resulted in bigger dependency issues, in turn resulting in not being able to install some applications purely because of a dependency on systemd somewhere down the chain. On non-systemd distros applications don't care which init system you use. It's not negative PR, it's real users having real issues that have had something pushed on to them. For systemd's original portrayed purpose there is no reason devs couldn't have spent their time creating configuration utilities for the existing inits. At least when something breaks on the established ones, there is only an init system to look at.

turrini 7y ago

Is there wireguard support?

pleasant_truthz 7y ago

So can anybody explain why did they decide to split Python into python3 and python3-pip packages? Pip is not some random third-party library, it's part of the official installation that you can get from python.org.

aorth 7y ago

Great! Now just waiting for official tarsnap and nginx.org builds so I can upgrade my servers. MariaDB already has Buster builds in their deb repositories.

cperciva 7y ago
Doesn't the existing Tarsnap package work?
- chrismsnz 7y ago
  Not for me - seems it depends on libssl1.0 and buster ships 1.1
  - cperciva 7y ago
    Oh, right. Try the experimental packages: http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01557.html http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01557.html

jimmyhoughjr 7y ago

yeah but npm is broken. Software update is broken because something was changed from testing to staging. Seems they didn't even test their first time setup.