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I was really turned off to Debian when I hit "apt-get install firefox" and it gave me ice weasel :/ Computers and religious whackjobs don't get to second guess

by bluehat 14y ago

I was really turned off to Debian when I hit "apt-get install firefox" and it gave me ice weasel :/ Computers and religious whackjobs don't get to second guess my command line :/

lumberjack 14y ago
I understand that you feel somewhat violated but before you say anything else let me just put a few facts on the table for you to make a better judgment. 1. Debian boasts of their totally free system and Debian users would feel equally violated if they think that they are using totally free software only to discover later that it was not the case. Disclaimer: The definition of "free software" is up for debate. I'm not condoning Debian's definition. Just informing. 2. Every distribution has it's package managers that tweak the packages in the repositories in various ways. Iceweasel is just a slightly tweaked version of Firefox. It's not a completely different package. You have noticed this background play only because they changed the name but it's not in any way different from the way the package managers decide which version of Gimp they put in Stable and what features of such version are to be disabled by default for security reasons or otherwise. 3. Iceweasel is fundamentally the same as Firefox. Except it's usually a bit older and more stable and goes through more rigorous security testing and maintenance. It also has all trademarks removed, hence the name change.
- bluehat 14y ago
  This is a very legit counterpoint, but I think both sides could have been made happy if a little prompt had popped up saying "this is non-free software, press Y to get the debian free fork, F to get the non-free Firefox, and n to quit"
  - ixacto 14y ago
    They actually have the non-free software like dropbox and some firmware. So all you have to do is nano /etc/apt/sources.list and append "contrib non-free" to everything and then apt-get update && apt-get install whatever.

by bluehat 14y ago

I was really turned off to Debian when I hit "apt-get install firefox" and it gave me ice weasel :/ Computers and religious whackjobs don't get to second guess my command line :/

lumberjack 14y ago

I understand that you feel somewhat violated but before you say anything else let me just put a few facts on the table for you to make a better judgment. 1. Debian boasts of their totally free system and Debian users would feel equally violated if they think that they are using totally free software only to discover later that it was not the case. Disclaimer: The definition of "free software" is up for debate. I'm not condoning Debian's definition. Just informing. 2. Every distribution has it's package managers that tweak the packages in the repositories in various ways. Iceweasel is just a slightly tweaked version of Firefox. It's not a completely different package. You have noticed this background play only because they changed the name but it's not in any way different from the way the package managers decide which version of Gimp they put in Stable and what features of such version are to be disabled by default for security reasons or otherwise. 3. Iceweasel is fundamentally the same as Firefox. Except it's usually a bit older and more stable and goes through more rigorous security testing and maintenance. It also has all trademarks removed, hence the name change.

bluehat 14y ago
This is a very legit counterpoint, but I think both sides could have been made happy if a little prompt had popped up saying "this is non-free software, press Y to get the debian free fork, F to get the non-free Firefox, and n to quit"
- ixacto 14y ago
  They actually have the non-free software like dropbox and some firmware. So all you have to do is nano /etc/apt/sources.list and append "contrib non-free" to everything and then apt-get update && apt-get install whatever.