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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 we

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).
- charlesdaniels 7y ago
  I am aware that the normal user account does not include /sbin, but `su` not adding it to PATH is different from previous releases to my knowledge. I am unsure of why this is the default behavior, however.
  - Crestwave 7y ago
    Simply `su` should not change the PATH; you have to start a login shell, as in `su -`.
    - charlesdaniels 7y ago
      Huh. I guess I just never noticed that... normally I do `sudo su`, which I believe does update PATH.
      - minitech 7y ago
        sudo tip: `sudo -i`!
        fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
        Yeah, sudo su always annoys me: sudo -i if you want a login shell and sudo -s if you don’t (e.g. you cd-ed somewhere and forgot to become root, but don’t want to cd again because the path is long or you have done some complicated setup.
        mkesper 7y ago
        Sudo su -c 'command1|command2' makes sense if both commands need root but you want to stay normal user afterwards.
        yrro 7y ago
        Then sudo bash -c '...'
ufo 7y ago
IIRC, the Debian installer will make your user account sudo if you leave the root password field blank during the installation wizard. If you provide a root password then your user is not made into a sudoer by default.
- charlesdaniels 7y ago
  I believe that is the case. I probably was not paying close attention at that stage. It's certainly not a difficult problem to fix, I was simply commenting on the fact that it had to be fixed, which has not been the case on most other distros I have used.
lamby 7y ago
Care to file bugs? We can possibly fix these in a point release..
- charlesdaniels 7y ago
  I feel like a lot of these are a little vague to write proper bug reports. If I get around to it and can re-produce the behavior that I was seeing with software center, that would probably be narrow enough in scope to file a bug report. But other issues like "the search screen is slow" are probably rather broad.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    They're really not. Bugs would be entirely appropriate.
    - lamby 7y ago
      I hate "plus ones" but... +1 to this.
      - charlesdaniels 7y ago
        Ok. I'm not very familiar with the Debian community. Is the place to put these types of bug reports the mailing list? Is there a Bugzilla?
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        BTS: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ How to report a bug: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting There is an interface package, "reportbug", to assist in filing: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/reportbug https://packages.debian.org/stretch/reportbug And also debbugs for querying / working with the BTS: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/debbugs https://packages.debian.org/jessie/debbugs
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> 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. I've been thinking about this myself, as I use a handful of programs which I am unwilling to give up but which Wayland will probably never properly support (intentionally; I'm fond of recording and playing back arbitrary input events, which Wayland has helpfully blocked for security reasons). My reading of the docs is that it's possible to run Wayland+xwayland as, effectively, a complete X server... well, it's not even a drop-in replacement, it's just an X server that happens to be implemented differently. So I think that if/when Xorg starts to become problematic to continue using, I can just swap it out for xwayland running in root window mode, and then run my X window manager and programs on top. Might need to mess with environment variables to mask Wayland so nothing tries to use it directly. Anybody else have thoughts/plans on the future of X if Wayland really does take over?
- thristian 7y ago
  My understanding is that every Wayland compositor automatically runs XWayland by default for compatibility reasons, and will do for the foreseeable future.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Xwayland is Xorg. It is one of the DDX backends available for Xorg, along with kdrive, XQuartz, Xephyr, the xfree86 backend, etc. If Xorg "becomes problematic to continue using", it will simply be removed. Xwayland will be removed too, since "nobody actually uses the legacy X protocol anymore". That's the goal, to keep X around for as long as is needed for "modern" toolkits and "modern" applications to transition fully to Wayland, before removing X entirely.
- dngray 7y ago
  > Anybody else have thoughts/plans on the future of X if Wayland really does take over? I have been thinking about this for a few years at least (happy i3wm user). I am looking at moving to Sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway (drop in replacement) at some point as it seems the development is really healthy. sircmpwn (Drew DeVault) has done a lot of really nice contribution to the FOSS community, in particular wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots I also thoroughly enjoy reading his blog https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com (articles from there often get posted here) there has been many a time I've read something he's written and thought "hear hear" in my mind. It is also impacting my purchasing choices in regard to going for AMDGPU instead of NVIDIA for my next system that I plan to buy in a few months (mostly waiting for 3rd party Navi cards at this point).
inamberclad 7y ago
The GNOME network configuration interface really kills it for me. Ubuntu's old default was nm-connection-editor and I liked it a lot more.
- charlesdaniels 7y ago
  I would cite the OpenBSD approach[1] as being particularly good. Ultimately, what you want is a list associating SSIDs with passwords, and that's all it is. It does not handle WPA2 enterprise though, which is sometimes a pain. I'm using nm-connection-editor and nmtui (depending on m mood) on my daily driver, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. 1 - https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Unfortunately the bold decision to take on Wayland (due to Gnome) in the upstream debian buster isn't going to propagate to low end hardware like Raspberry Pi incl. Pi4. Though the Buster based raspbian will be available, they will continue using the LXDE version as Gnome is too heavy for the Pi. I had tried Wayland for Pi3 earlier in my effort to get a smoother desktop experience on the Raspberry Pi[1], it was the smoothest desktop environment among other options but unusable due to XWayland apps crashing due to framebuffer issues. I've settled for HW accelerated, Xfce4, Arch Linux (btrfs/zswap) on RPi3. [1]: https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experience-on-raspberry-pi/ https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experien...
alxlaz 7y ago
> 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) It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting. They're great if you have a touch screen but it would be really cool if you could turn them off on systems without touch screens, i.e. about 99% of the current Linux installations I'm guessing :-). If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space.
- frutiger 7y ago
  I totally agree with your overall point, but: > about 99% of the current Linux installations Not if you include Android!
  - ufo 7y ago
    In these contexts people usually mean "GNU/Linux desktop" when they say "Linux". It is not as if we have any meaningful choice of desktop environment on Android-land anyway.
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    > Not if you include Android! How many Android installations running Gnome have you seen in the wild :-)?
- dagmx 7y ago
  The person you're replying to said scaling not spacing. Very different issues. They may have optimal spacing but their scaling is being handled incorrectly by the system, or they may have perfect scaling but suboptimal spacing. Or they're both good or they both suck. It's best not to conflate the two.
  - charlesdaniels 7y ago
    I could also criticize the spacing, but much ink has already been spilled on Gnome 3.X on both sides of the argument; I'm not looking to start a flame war. However, I was under the impression that previous versions of Gnome supported non-integer scaling factors, which seems to be gone from current GTK versions(?). Just being able to set the scale to 0.5 or 0.75 would go a long way for people with lower res screens. Even though I don't use Gnome myself, this still affects me, since many applications use GTK, and thus have massive Fisher Price buttons compared to other programs I use.
dvfjsdhgfv 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`). It's been like this since day one; people started to expect a different behavior after Ubuntu became popular, but Debian is consistent in this regard. Adding an account to the sudo/wheel group should be a conscious decision on the part of the administrator as it has major security implications.

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).

charlesdaniels 7y ago
I am aware that the normal user account does not include /sbin, but `su` not adding it to PATH is different from previous releases to my knowledge. I am unsure of why this is the default behavior, however.
- Crestwave 7y ago
  Simply `su` should not change the PATH; you have to start a login shell, as in `su -`.
  - charlesdaniels 7y ago
    Huh. I guess I just never noticed that... normally I do `sudo su`, which I believe does update PATH.
    - minitech 7y ago
      sudo tip: `sudo -i`!
      - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
        Yeah, sudo su always annoys me: sudo -i if you want a login shell and sudo -s if you don’t (e.g. you cd-ed somewhere and forgot to become root, but don’t want to cd again because the path is long or you have done some complicated setup.
        mkesper 7y ago
        Sudo su -c 'command1|command2' makes sense if both commands need root but you want to stay normal user afterwards.
        yrro 7y ago
        Then sudo bash -c '...'

ufo 7y ago

IIRC, the Debian installer will make your user account sudo if you leave the root password field blank during the installation wizard. If you provide a root password then your user is not made into a sudoer by default.

charlesdaniels 7y ago
I believe that is the case. I probably was not paying close attention at that stage. It's certainly not a difficult problem to fix, I was simply commenting on the fact that it had to be fixed, which has not been the case on most other distros I have used.

lamby 7y ago

Care to file bugs? We can possibly fix these in a point release..

charlesdaniels 7y ago
I feel like a lot of these are a little vague to write proper bug reports. If I get around to it and can re-produce the behavior that I was seeing with software center, that would probably be narrow enough in scope to file a bug report. But other issues like "the search screen is slow" are probably rather broad.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  They're really not. Bugs would be entirely appropriate.
  - lamby 7y ago
    I hate "plus ones" but... +1 to this.
    - charlesdaniels 7y ago
      Ok. I'm not very familiar with the Debian community. Is the place to put these types of bug reports the mailing list? Is there a Bugzilla?
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        BTS: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ How to report a bug: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting There is an interface package, "reportbug", to assist in filing: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/reportbug https://packages.debian.org/stretch/reportbug And also debbugs for querying / working with the BTS: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/debbugs https://packages.debian.org/jessie/debbugs

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> 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. I've been thinking about this myself, as I use a handful of programs which I am unwilling to give up but which Wayland will probably never properly support (intentionally; I'm fond of recording and playing back arbitrary input events, which Wayland has helpfully blocked for security reasons). My reading of the docs is that it's possible to run Wayland+xwayland as, effectively, a complete X server... well, it's not even a drop-in replacement, it's just an X server that happens to be implemented differently. So I think that if/when Xorg starts to become problematic to continue using, I can just swap it out for xwayland running in root window mode, and then run my X window manager and programs on top. Might need to mess with environment variables to mask Wayland so nothing tries to use it directly. Anybody else have thoughts/plans on the future of X if Wayland really does take over?

thristian 7y ago
My understanding is that every Wayland compositor automatically runs XWayland by default for compatibility reasons, and will do for the foreseeable future.
bitwize 7y ago
Xwayland is Xorg. It is one of the DDX backends available for Xorg, along with kdrive, XQuartz, Xephyr, the xfree86 backend, etc. If Xorg "becomes problematic to continue using", it will simply be removed. Xwayland will be removed too, since "nobody actually uses the legacy X protocol anymore". That's the goal, to keep X around for as long as is needed for "modern" toolkits and "modern" applications to transition fully to Wayland, before removing X entirely.
dngray 7y ago
> Anybody else have thoughts/plans on the future of X if Wayland really does take over? I have been thinking about this for a few years at least (happy i3wm user). I am looking at moving to Sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway (drop in replacement) at some point as it seems the development is really healthy. sircmpwn (Drew DeVault) has done a lot of really nice contribution to the FOSS community, in particular wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots I also thoroughly enjoy reading his blog https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com (articles from there often get posted here) there has been many a time I've read something he's written and thought "hear hear" in my mind. It is also impacting my purchasing choices in regard to going for AMDGPU instead of NVIDIA for my next system that I plan to buy in a few months (mostly waiting for 3rd party Navi cards at this point).

inamberclad 7y ago

The GNOME network configuration interface really kills it for me. Ubuntu's old default was nm-connection-editor and I liked it a lot more.

charlesdaniels 7y ago
I would cite the OpenBSD approach[1] as being particularly good. Ultimately, what you want is a list associating SSIDs with passwords, and that's all it is. It does not handle WPA2 enterprise though, which is sometimes a pain. I'm using nm-connection-editor and nmtui (depending on m mood) on my daily driver, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. 1 - https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if https://man.openbsd.org/hostname.if

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Unfortunately the bold decision to take on Wayland (due to Gnome) in the upstream debian buster isn't going to propagate to low end hardware like Raspberry Pi incl. Pi4. Though the Buster based raspbian will be available, they will continue using the LXDE version as Gnome is too heavy for the Pi. I had tried Wayland for Pi3 earlier in my effort to get a smoother desktop experience on the Raspberry Pi[1], it was the smoothest desktop environment among other options but unusable due to XWayland apps crashing due to framebuffer issues. I've settled for HW accelerated, Xfce4, Arch Linux (btrfs/zswap) on RPi3. [1]: https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experience-on-raspberry-pi/ https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experien...

alxlaz 7y ago

> 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) It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting. They're great if you have a touch screen but it would be really cool if you could turn them off on systems without touch screens, i.e. about 99% of the current Linux installations I'm guessing :-). If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space.

frutiger 7y ago
I totally agree with your overall point, but: > about 99% of the current Linux installations Not if you include Android!
- ufo 7y ago
  In these contexts people usually mean "GNU/Linux desktop" when they say "Linux". It is not as if we have any meaningful choice of desktop environment on Android-land anyway.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  > Not if you include Android! How many Android installations running Gnome have you seen in the wild :-)?
dagmx 7y ago
The person you're replying to said scaling not spacing. Very different issues. They may have optimal spacing but their scaling is being handled incorrectly by the system, or they may have perfect scaling but suboptimal spacing. Or they're both good or they both suck. It's best not to conflate the two.
- charlesdaniels 7y ago
  I could also criticize the spacing, but much ink has already been spilled on Gnome 3.X on both sides of the argument; I'm not looking to start a flame war. However, I was under the impression that previous versions of Gnome supported non-integer scaling factors, which seems to be gone from current GTK versions(?). Just being able to set the scale to 0.5 or 0.75 would go a long way for people with lower res screens. Even though I don't use Gnome myself, this still affects me, since many applications use GTK, and thus have massive Fisher Price buttons compared to other programs I use.

dvfjsdhgfv 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`). It's been like this since day one; people started to expect a different behavior after Ubuntu became popular, but Debian is consistent in this regard. Adding an account to the sudo/wheel group should be a conscious decision on the part of the administrator as it has major security implications.