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Why are you using Debian then? Debian is about flexibility, they build for an insane multitude of architectures and they offer Hurd and FreeBSD kernels even! Wi

Why are you using Debian then? Debian is about flexibility, they build for an insane multitude of architectures and they offer Hurd and FreeBSD kernels even! With every package imaginable, Debian maintainers already invest a lot of work in supporting all of this. They work very hard to automate tests and builds in order to minimize this effort level and manage to create a high quality, flexible system. If you don't want flexibility but instead want a single ascended choice system like on OS X or Windows, use RHEL or one of the forks of it instead. Debian may simply not be the system for you.

acdha 12y ago
> Why are you using Debian then? Debian is about flexibility That's really a fundamental misrepresentation of Debian. As a Debian user since around 1997 or so, the value has always been that you get solid, tested packages which work out of the box – almost everything you need is an apt-get away and it's consistent across all of the systems with the same packages installed. When I was responsible for somewhat over a hundred systems (servers & desktops) that was invaluable for delivering a consistent user experience. Maximum flexibility would be something more like Gentoo where you can play around with config options and rebuild software with arcane flags, with the expectation that you're comfortable spending time diagnosing anything which breaks if you hit a combination which hasn't been well tested by anyone else. This is highly relevant to the discussion above because consistency starts becoming a LOT more work when you start needing to coordinate between multiple major projects. If you want, e.g., Firefox or Chrome to be able to use a webcam just after it's plugged in that requires communication a bunch of large code-bases (kernel, GNOME, audio daemon, browser, probably some sort of permission system which may or may not be in one or more of these, etc.) and all of that is either going to be harder or slower if you have to support a bunch of different systems with differing designs, bugs and it's a tax which people who don't support Debian won't have to pay. Remembering the era where people just accepted that things like audio or video wouldn't work on Linux because it was too much hassle, I appreciate the value of a single target.

acdha 12y ago

> Why are you using Debian then? Debian is about flexibility That's really a fundamental misrepresentation of Debian. As a Debian user since around 1997 or so, the value has always been that you get solid, tested packages which work out of the box – almost everything you need is an apt-get away and it's consistent across all of the systems with the same packages installed. When I was responsible for somewhat over a hundred systems (servers & desktops) that was invaluable for delivering a consistent user experience. Maximum flexibility would be something more like Gentoo where you can play around with config options and rebuild software with arcane flags, with the expectation that you're comfortable spending time diagnosing anything which breaks if you hit a combination which hasn't been well tested by anyone else. This is highly relevant to the discussion above because consistency starts becoming a LOT more work when you start needing to coordinate between multiple major projects. If you want, e.g., Firefox or Chrome to be able to use a webcam just after it's plugged in that requires communication a bunch of large code-bases (kernel, GNOME, audio daemon, browser, probably some sort of permission system which may or may not be in one or more of these, etc.) and all of that is either going to be harder or slower if you have to support a bunch of different systems with differing designs, bugs and it's a tax which people who don't support Debian won't have to pay. Remembering the era where people just accepted that things like audio or video wouldn't work on Linux because it was too much hassle, I appreciate the value of a single target.