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I looked at moving our cloud machines to Debian rather than Ubuntu. I concluded it may not be worth it: - Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don

I looked at moving our cloud machines to Debian rather than Ubuntu. I concluded it may not be worth it: - Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this. - Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this) - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 - I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack) + No snap shit. If anyone can provide me with more ammo to move to Debian I'd welcome it.

teddyh 4y ago
> - Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this. Then don’t install it? I don’t get the problem. > - Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this) Fixed and released a week ago: https://bugs.debian.org/892664 https://bugs.debian.org/892664 > - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it. > - I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack) “No obvious performace improvements” is a negative? What you can reasonably expect of Debian is the same as Ubuntu, minus the bloatware.
- rascul 4y ago
  > > - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 > Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it. 1.74 was a year old when bullseye was released, and there had been at least three boost releases in that time. PHP is another example. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 : > PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)… There is plenty of software this happens to in Debian, and Debian isn't the only distro this happens with. We need distros maintaining stability as must as we need distros moving fast and breaking things, and everywhere in between. It just means that some distros might not be an exact fit for all use cases. And that's fine.
  - jraph 4y ago
    The Debian packager of PHP and Apache also provides a neat repository with very up to date versions: https://deb.sury.org/ https://deb.sury.org/
  - mmarx 4y ago
    > > PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)… Packaging PHP 8 would have required to drop, e.g., the mediawiki package, which only become compatible with PHP 8 in 1.39, released November 2022.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Boost 1.81 in Debian currently has some bugs which prevent its inclusion in Debian proper: https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?experimental=1&package=boost-defaults https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?experimental=1&package=boo...
throw0101c 4y ago
> - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 Debian is released every two years. Debian gets security updates through LTS for five years. If the packages in Debian are "old" it's because of the biennial release cycle. As a sysadmin I'm fine with that, and Debian is no worse than Ubuntu which has its LTS every two years as well. If you're on the desktop then there could be an advantage to running the more frequent non-LTS releases. But I'm fine with the biennial LTS, which makes Debian and Ubuntu roughly equivalent.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Though Ubuntu LTS has more sane exceptions for things like browsers and desktop apps pre-snap.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Unattended-upgrades is one of the reasons I used to install Ubuntu as a default server OS. Combining that and an automated reboot is practically all you need to keep your server secure enough in most cases. Ubuntu runs boost 1.74 just like Debian. Upgrading to a new version is likely to break stuff and neither Ubuntu not Debian are rolling release distros, so it wouldn't make sense for them to update already. The upcoming 23.04 not containing the newer Boost version makes less sense, unless there are compatibility problems that can't be fixed before release. Either way, Debian is Ubuntu without all the Ubuntu. If Ubuntu works for you now, Debian will probably work for you with minimal changes to your workflow. In many cases it packages more recent versions of software because it's "LTS" cycles are faster than Ubuntu's. If you want rolling release updates completely under your control, consider Arch or one of its derivatives (Endeavour/Manjaro/etc.) instead. All three of them come with the warning that a standard system update can make your OS unbootable if you don't read the change logs, but that's just a consequence of always using the latest and greatest.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Downthread there's this: >>Canonical has been taking steps to advertise their paid offerings in increasing velocity lately. Is there something that's been triggering this? >https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo... "Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023" (April 2022 story). So it sounds like it is the start of an active commercialisation of the users. Since Snap started getting pushed more heavily I've been looking to change. I've tried Pop_OS but it doesn't fit well for me. I want to stay on a relatively vanilla KDE ... probably try Debian next (been on Ubuntu for something like 15 years, was Slackware before that).
kyrra 4y ago
> Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 You can always run Debian testing or sid if you don't need rock solid stability. If you don't want to do that, you can stay on Debian stable and use the backports repo: https://backports.debian.org/ https://backports.debian.org/
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this) Well... okay? You can't install Fedora RPMs on it either. Installing packages from another distro might sometimes work, but only more or less by coincidence; you really shouldn't be doing that.

teddyh 4y ago

> - Debian still has the unattended-upgrades thing. I don't like this. Then don’t install it? I don’t get the problem. > - Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this) Fixed and released a week ago: https://bugs.debian.org/892664 https://bugs.debian.org/892664 > - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it. > - I couldn't see any obvious performance improvements (Apache stack) “No obvious performace improvements” is a negative? What you can reasonably expect of Debian is the same as Ubuntu, minus the bloatware.

rascul 4y ago
> > - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 > Boost 1.81 is in experimental; download the package if you want it. 1.74 was a year old when bullseye was released, and there had been at least three boost releases in that time. PHP is another example. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180482 : > PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)… There is plenty of software this happens to in Debian, and Debian isn't the only distro this happens with. We need distros maintaining stability as must as we need distros moving fast and breaking things, and everywhere in between. It just means that some distros might not be an exact fit for all use cases. And that's fine.
- jraph 4y ago
  The Debian packager of PHP and Apache also provides a neat repository with very up to date versions: https://deb.sury.org/ https://deb.sury.org/
- mmarx 4y ago
  > > PHP 8.0 is 10 months old, and debian’s upcoming release will be upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4, which will make 7.4 the standard for the next ~3 years (even though it only gets upstream support for 1 more year)… Packaging PHP 8 would have required to drop, e.g., the mediawiki package, which only become compatible with PHP 8 in 1.39, released November 2022.
- teddyh 4y ago
  Boost 1.81 in Debian currently has some bugs which prevent its inclusion in Debian proper: https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?experimental=1&package=boost-defaults https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?experimental=1&package=boo...

throw0101c 4y ago

> - Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 Debian is released every two years. Debian gets security updates through LTS for five years. If the packages in Debian are "old" it's because of the biennial release cycle. As a sysadmin I'm fine with that, and Debian is no worse than Ubuntu which has its LTS every two years as well. If you're on the desktop then there could be an advantage to running the more frequent non-LTS releases. But I'm fine with the biennial LTS, which makes Debian and Ubuntu roughly equivalent.

jacooper 4y ago
Though Ubuntu LTS has more sane exceptions for things like browsers and desktop apps pre-snap.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Unattended-upgrades is one of the reasons I used to install Ubuntu as a default server OS. Combining that and an automated reboot is practically all you need to keep your server secure enough in most cases. Ubuntu runs boost 1.74 just like Debian. Upgrading to a new version is likely to break stuff and neither Ubuntu not Debian are rolling release distros, so it wouldn't make sense for them to update already. The upcoming 23.04 not containing the newer Boost version makes less sense, unless there are compatibility problems that can't be fixed before release. Either way, Debian is Ubuntu without all the Ubuntu. If Ubuntu works for you now, Debian will probably work for you with minimal changes to your workflow. In many cases it packages more recent versions of software because it's "LTS" cycles are faster than Ubuntu's. If you want rolling release updates completely under your control, consider Arch or one of its derivatives (Endeavour/Manjaro/etc.) instead. All three of them come with the warning that a standard system update can make your OS unbootable if you don't read the change logs, but that's just a consequence of always using the latest and greatest.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

Downthread there's this: >>Canonical has been taking steps to advertise their paid offerings in increasing velocity lately. Is there something that's been triggering this? >https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo... "Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023" (April 2022 story). So it sounds like it is the start of an active commercialisation of the users. Since Snap started getting pushed more heavily I've been looking to change. I've tried Pop_OS but it doesn't fit well for me. I want to stay on a relatively vanilla KDE ... probably try Debian next (been on Ubuntu for something like 15 years, was Slackware before that).

kyrra 4y ago

> Debian's packages can be quite far behind, for example the current version of Boost is 1.74 where the offical release 1.81 You can always run Debian testing or sid if you don't need rock solid stability. If you don't want to do that, you can stay on Debian stable and use the backports repo: https://backports.debian.org/ https://backports.debian.org/

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> Debian's package manager doesn't support zstd compression so you can't use modern Ubuntu packages on it (I _think_ they're fixing this) Well... okay? You can't install Fedora RPMs on it either. Installing packages from another distro might sometimes work, but only more or less by coincidence; you really shouldn't be doing that.