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Maybe a trust issue? e.g. Mozilla did not want the Debian team the ability to create some strangely modified version of Firefox that would be mistakenly connect

by warent 3y ago

Maybe a trust issue? e.g. Mozilla did not want the Debian team the ability to create some strangely modified version of Firefox that would be mistakenly connected to Mozilla. Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted. The interesting thing is that the pain actually did go both ways. The lack of Firefox and the need for Iceweasel actually confused me as a young developer, and put me off Linux for a long time, because it made it feel like a cheap knock-off. I was unaware that they were otherwise identical.

zokier 3y ago
> Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted. You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in reality Debian-specific
- asveikau 3y ago
  2006 was around the time where they zero-initialized an entropy buffer in openssl to silence valgrind or similar tools. So the idea that debian would seriously botch a package was not so far fetched. That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    That was pretty rad. Debian could generate up to 65536 different keypairs!!1
ltbarcly3 3y ago
Did Internet Explorer make you think Windows was junk or did you just download Firefox like everyone else? You can.. I mean people know this right.. You can download software on Linux and run it just like on Windows.
- NegativeK 3y ago
  One of the really nice things about distros is letting them manage all or almost all of the software you've installed, versus wandering around on the internet and hoping you didn't click on malvertising or wondering if the ssh client you're grabbing is actually legit. The Windows model of zero trust in the bad way feels absolutely bizarre in comparison.
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    I agree, package managers are great. However why is that a reason to avoid linux?

by warent 3y ago

zokier 3y ago

> Back then perhaps there was not enough context to know that Debian could be trusted. You are implying that it is clear-cut that Debian is trustworthy here. In practice Debian did, and continues to do, heavy patching of packages to their needs, sometimes contrary to upstreams wishes. Iirc one of the issues here was the bug reports that Mozilla received that were in reality Debian-specific

asveikau 3y ago
2006 was around the time where they zero-initialized an entropy buffer in openssl to silence valgrind or similar tools. So the idea that debian would seriously botch a package was not so far fetched. That said, I used Debian, and didn't mind seeing iceweasel. It was kind of amusing, in fact.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  That was pretty rad. Debian could generate up to 65536 different keypairs!!1

ltbarcly3 3y ago

Did Internet Explorer make you think Windows was junk or did you just download Firefox like everyone else? You can.. I mean people know this right.. You can download software on Linux and run it just like on Windows.

NegativeK 3y ago
One of the really nice things about distros is letting them manage all or almost all of the software you've installed, versus wandering around on the internet and hoping you didn't click on malvertising or wondering if the ssh client you're grabbing is actually legit. The Windows model of zero trust in the bad way feels absolutely bizarre in comparison.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  I agree, package managers are great. However why is that a reason to avoid linux?