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> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. IME, they do keep things fairly vanilla, and I speak as someon

> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. IME, they do keep things fairly vanilla, and I speak as someone who has run Debian since . . . I wanna say 2002? Plus I've done kernel dev work, and Debian's kernel patches ain't nothing compared to what RedHat used to do.

freedomben 6y ago
I maintain a custom/forked driver[1] and support both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu, and while Ubuntu has gotten much better, in years past I actually had to manage Ubuntu specific branches because they were so hacked up with custom patches from Canonical. I would spend more time fixing Ubuntu weirdness than I would all other distros combined. It's gotten much better the past several releases though, so thank you to Canonical for that :-) The various RPM flavors keep their kernels vanilla enough that I can mostly just rebase on top of linux-stable, and it's been that way since I started 7 years ago (according to github). Arch is the winner. I've never had to make a custom patch for Arch. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver
- npsimons 6y ago
  Fair enough, but I don't put Ubuntu in the same class as Debian, because while they may share many base packages in common, I do seem to remember them patching the kernel more than Debian, and usually stuff that would break my kernel dev too. Hence another reason I'm not on Ubuntu.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Agreed. On a related but different note it does seem like Debian gets (unfairly) painted with light generated by Ubuntu. I run Debian on some machines and most of the issues I have with Ubuntu are not problems on Debian (such as: Snap obsession and forcing, Abandoned/system-wrecking PPAs that are hard to recover from, etc)

freedomben 6y ago

I maintain a custom/forked driver[1] and support both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu, and while Ubuntu has gotten much better, in years past I actually had to manage Ubuntu specific branches because they were so hacked up with custom patches from Canonical. I would spend more time fixing Ubuntu weirdness than I would all other distros combined. It's gotten much better the past several releases though, so thank you to Canonical for that :-) The various RPM flavors keep their kernels vanilla enough that I can mostly just rebase on top of linux-stable, and it's been that way since I started 7 years ago (according to github). Arch is the winner. I've never had to make a custom patch for Arch. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver

npsimons 6y ago
Fair enough, but I don't put Ubuntu in the same class as Debian, because while they may share many base packages in common, I do seem to remember them patching the kernel more than Debian, and usually stuff that would break my kernel dev too. Hence another reason I'm not on Ubuntu.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Agreed. On a related but different note it does seem like Debian gets (unfairly) painted with light generated by Ubuntu. I run Debian on some machines and most of the issues I have with Ubuntu are not problems on Debian (such as: Snap obsession and forcing, Abandoned/system-wrecking PPAs that are hard to recover from, etc)