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I use Debian, a lot, I happily run it on most of my servers. But I can completely understand that it's not great for the majority of users. Stable is too stabl
by 3np 6y ago
I use Debian, a lot, I happily run it on most of my servers. But I can completely understand that it's not great for the majority of users.
Stable is too stable for the average desktop user - often kernel is missing drivers for newer hardware models, or system libraries are too old for newer applications.
Testing works most of the time but is not stable enough. Most recent example; zfs, which is on 0.8.x, is completely broken in testing since the kernel upgrade to 5.10 in December. zfs has not (and prob will not) backported 5.10 compatibility to 0.8.x. Last I heard, the Debian maintainers were still not decided on if they are going to backport the 5.10 fix to their own fork of zfs 0.8.x, or if they're going to do the upgrade to zfs 2.0 already.
I had a couple of servers where I had stupidly enabled unattended-upgrades, which broke the filesystems and required recovery to make services start again. Annoying, but it was my mistake.
This kind of situation is completely expected and there's really no one at fault. But it is a good example of why vanilla Debian is not suitable for many users and use-cases. Mint does seem like a better Ubuntu, though.
- happymellon 6y agoBackport frankenware is probably the biggest reason I wouldn't recommend Debian. They do not have the time and resources to figure out every inevitable configuration, and they end up supporting a mishmash of unsupportable software. Backported ZFS just brings fear in my eyes, these filesystems have to have many decades of testing before people are comfortable with it, and Debian finds it acceptable to make a custom patched version. Not cool. If you want to store all your data on that configuration then by all means, but I'm afraid I won't run a distro that plays games to avoid changing a version number.
- 3np 6y agoJust to be clear, the backporting part was just hearsay that it was under debate, so don't take my word for that one.
- happymellon 6y agoThey backport all sorts of things, the fact that this is even a discussion point is bad enough.
- happymellon 6y agoI'm sorry I misread this. > the backporting part was just hearsay that it was under debate I guess if it is just hearsay then thats something else. Does Debian have guidelines about what they wouldn't backport?
- 3np 6y agoI'm not certain about guidelines, but zfs 2.0.1 has landed in bullseye \o/ https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/zfs-dkms https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/zfs-dkms
- snicker7 6y agoSolution: use a distro-agnostic package manager (Nix, Guix, Homebrew, FlatPak, ...) on top of Debian. Stable base + modern apps.