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Debian is Slow, Worse, Expensive

Open source may be good, but there is one example that sticks out like a sore thumb as a problem with open source. Debian gnu/Linux. It is offically the Worst Linux Distribution ever made.

First of all, Debian has the most out of date software packages of any major mainstream distros. Even in the unstable version, is KDE 2.2 and Gnome 2.0, with Xfree86 4.1 (A version that really sucks). There are literally years that pass between each update of Debian.

Secondly, its a pain in the goatse to set up, first of all, you are forced to use Kernel 2.2, which is horribly hacked with "backports" to get any use on any modern machine (Read, made after 1999). Good luck memorizing all the *.ko files in /lib/modules, as you are going to need it.

Configuring XFree86 is hell! If you don't have a Thick X11 orilley book, and a list of your horizontal sync values from your monitor's intruction manual (if you even have one), BOOM! There goes your monitor.

Even then, good luck getting anything over 640x480@16 colours.

The most common response to help questions on the Debian mailing list is "n00b, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL, you idiot, go back to WINDOWS XP if you can't learn to use dselect", true too, search the archives if you think I'm lying. Other distros give you comprehensive PRINTED MANUALS, PHONE SUPPPORT and/or freindly forums where repling RTFM gets you banned!

Debians support for any decent hardware, including USB mice, scanners, Sound cards, heck even Serial devices struggle. If you can even get 80x25 text mode with PS/2 input devices you are really lucky.

Apt-get has many flaws. First of all it uses a non standard package format (the rest of the world uses RPM, deprecate the DEB format!), has broken respetories, and out of date software to install. All this combined with the kludgey dselect user interface make package management a nightmare.

And if you think I'm joking about this, find out why THOUSANDS of Debian users are switching to REAL distributions Debian is falling to pieces, if it is to survive any market share it will be through its superior forks (Xandros, Lindows, K/G-noppix) and unoffical package respetories.

Of course, while all this is going on, the only thing the Debian maintainers do is argue about politics on the mailing lists. The distribution decays while its creators argue over inane details like software licensing and the virtues of Marxism. Please! Spare me the political rhetoric and just give me a working distro!

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and I'm happily using distros such as Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo and Fedora. But I'm sick to death of zealots that push obsolete Distros on me EVERY FREAKING TIME linux is mentioned. I'm speaking from real world experiance here.

Only on /. will a posting on another soapbox website, recounting a biased personal experience completely lacking any sort of scientific method whatsoever, be offered up as something credible...

(Yes, I realise anecdotal means without rigorous study. But, sheesh, this thing doesn't even have the *beginnings* of objective research - if your standards are that loose, then every post here saying "GUIs are better" qualifies as "anecdotal evidence").

atrocious speed

Previously Submitted language comparison puts java ahead of all other languages for business based applications. (When ignoring results for 64bit trigonometry...not often used in business apps).

And swing is only slow when coded badly. When programmed well, and mastered, it is just as rapid as native guis, and significantly more maintainable than MFC coded gui apps.

Because commandline is NOT END-USER FRIENDLY.

Says who? A lot of GUIs are not end-user friendly either. Just because some CLI programs require the user to know arcane options does not mean that the CLI itself is broken. In fact, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the command line is easier to learn for people who have never used computers before.

Click a picture with a music note flowing into a CD, you burn your CD. That's much easier than " CD_DA TRACK AUDIO FILE "secret-pregap.wav" START FILE "track1.wav""

Come on, you have to do more than click an icon. At the very least, you have to select which files you want to burn from a list. More likely, you drag and drop the files you want to burn. That's easy for you, but not necessarily intuitive to someone who's never used a mouse before. With a CLI, a you at least have the option to write a script. Aunt Tillie might find it easier to type "burn file1.wav" than figure out which mouse button to press, and which icons to drag where.

Why do people think that the command line is *not* "user friendly"?

Question: Is this an "Ask Slashdot" or an advertisement for Krispy Cream and Apple?

Also, since the editorial already starts us off with an "OS X vs Linux" flamewar, let me add to the discussion... Windows and Linux admins in the same organization? What organization is this?!

Why do people think that the command line is *not* "user friendly"? Do we write books by pointing and clicking at icons, avatars, and pictures? Except under amazing cirumcstances (Steven Hawking, the blind, etc) would you hire an author that did? Then why a system administrator?

Maybe Sun is not the first but its a core part of their ideology. This link to OS News has a link and discussion about this.

Osnews have started to use this technique of advertising. Personally I find that the ad can get in the way of the article, very annoying!!

Cheesy marketing drivel, yes, but with a grain of truth. At the risk of being moded down to Hades by Mac lovers, let me very carefully point out that to some of us, OS X is not the operating system to end all operating systems. It has some problems (like a clumsy finder that dumps its bloody .DS_Store files all over every filesystem it can get its hands on), some severe limitations (like a Mail program that doesn't do TLS), and lacks important capabilities (no well-integrated office program except MS Office).

Don't get me wrong, OS X is probably the best operating system available for pure-consumer type users. When my co-worker complained to me a few days ago that he caught some sort of dialer virus thingy, I told him (politely) to get rid of the problem (Microsoft) and buy a Mac. Is Linux for him? No. He would be very happy with Apple's closed-world, choice-is-bad philosophy.

Some of us, however, like choice, and don't want to, say, pay extra for modern features like virtual desktops that Apple's engineers consider too confusing for us and are covered by shareware. I want a modern mailer (good grief, even the 0.5 BETA of Mozilla Thunderbird has TLS), I want Konqueror instead of the brain-damaged Finder, I want my right-click-lelf-click-done! mouse back. But I love the hardware: My iBook G4 is quiet under heavy loads, for example, and battery life is good.

Linux on a PowerPC gives you the best of both worlds -- even more so because you can use Mac-on-Linux to run your Mac OS X applications from inside Linux. Nobody is talking about wiping OS X off the computer (well, except maybe for this guy), because, remember, though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are jealous computer gods, Linus is not. I did dual-boot for years with Windows before swiching completely. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

A lot of Mac people I have gotten to know after buying my iBook have no idea how good KDE and Gnome have become, they seem to think that Linux users still have to figure out the refresh parameters for X11 by hand. With more and more Linux people moving to PowerPC hardware, I think we'll see more discussions between OS X and Linux users. Linux can give OS X a good run for its mon-, er, can force Apple to try harder, a lot harder, in fact. And that is good for Mac fans, too.

Giving a more respectable name will give it a better reputation, and will make it more recognisable as a brand. Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and Java Desktop all are famous Linux brands, Lindows will have to follow in their footsteps!

My comments about "one true linux" are not meant to be elitist. Linux in my mind should be primarly open source and primarily developed by volunteers. The path of linux should follow the needs of the people who are willing to develop, test, and volunteer on the project. RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are trying to drive Linux to commercial sucess - RedHat esp.

In some respects, I don't want Linux to get to idiot/moron proof. Linux/Unix/Computers are tools, you should learn about them before you use them for important things. Linux should be ubiquitous like cars but we will still have driving lessons.

As for Debian being hard to install, I strongly disagree. I have found it easier than Redhat. There are many good install guides. The most trouble people have is hardware. I don't think it is too much of a request to ask people to know what computer they have. Again, you don't go the auto parts store without knowing what year, brand, model you have when you buy an oil filter do you?

For install guides, I found these the most helpful for understanding the Debian Way for install and kernel. It didn't take that much effort to understand.

This is not meant as flamebait but if a user does not what to spend the time to understand what they are doing and a basic understanding of the computer and system they should stick with XP and Windows Update.

My comments about "one true linux" are not meant to be elitist. Linux in my mind should be primarly open source and primarily developed by volunteers. The path of linux should follow the needs of the people who are willing to develop, test, and volunteer on the project. RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are trying to drive Linux to commercial sucess - RedHat esp.

In some respects, I don't want Linux to get to idiot/moron proof. Linux/Unix/Computers are tools, you should learn about them before you use them for important things. Linux should be ubiquitous like cars but we will still have driving lessons.

As for Debian being hard to install, I strongly disagree. I have found it easier than Redhat. There are many good install guides. The most trouble people have is hardware. I don't think it is too much of a request to ask people to know what computer they have. Again, you don't go the auto parts store without knowing what year, brand, model you have when you buy an oil filter do you?

For install guides, I found these the most helpful for understanding the Debian Way for install and kernel. It didn't take that much effort to understand.

This is not meant as flamebait but if a user does not what to spend the time to understand what they are doing and a basic understanding of the computer and system they should stick with XP and Windows Update.

Here's what a Sun worker had to say about it.

We know who you are, Eugenia...

A Republican website could read: "Slashdot subtlely brainwashes and force conforms its readers into being liberal ... majority of slashdotters have broadband, is there a link?"

Have you read OSNews.com lately? That site has turned into exactly of what you speak. They even practice heavy censorship.

Yes, thats almost 15% of the market. It may not sound like much, but that is potential billion$ not being made

Article here!

Plus if you haven't downloaded Openoffice.org, download it here

The Future of OSS Desktop Development, Part II is a current discussion of the blog debate between Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza regarding Havoc's initial essay on Mono, Java, and the Linux desktop.

also worth a read is Rasterman's (lead developer of the Enlightenment project) comment.

educate yourself.

peace

Python is much faster, both starting and running, and seems to use less resources.

Python programs seem less prone to runtime errors (NullPointerException), and are generally more solid.

Python is much quicker to write, easier to understand and easier to debug

You can usually run your unit tests in Python in less time than it takes just to compile your Java. So you actually get more checks in less time!

It really depends on your setup. I've got a 133 dpi LCD, and I can definitely say it looks better. Cleartype hints far too aggressively for a display that has that many pixels to play with. For a medium-res CRT, I'd rather have non-anti-aliased, hinted output anyway. If you've got that bytecode hinter on, you'll get identical output (pixel-for-pixel) in that case. Screenshot of my desktop Note, unless you've got a 133 dpi display or higher, the fonts will look unusually large.

In any case, I think FreeType's anti-aliased output at medium resolutions is actually quite good. Read one of my rants on OSNews (search for title "Font comparo thread"). Note the attached screenshot, taken at a more sane resolution.

This new dialog is not only much more confusing looking, but seems bloated

I disagree. It has many new features compared to the old dialog, and they are cleanly laid out. You have bookmarks now, to quickly go to a folder you use often; there is a preview available now; and there are many different ways to quickly get to the folder you want (e.g. you can go up two folders with one click; you can go to your home directory with one click; etc.)

rather ugly

Matter of taste. That screenshot is using a theme I don't personally like, but in a more soothing theme, the new dialogs look just fine.

and doesn't have the text entry box -- i.e, they removed the one great feature they used to have!

Calm down. The text-entry box is still there if you want it. If it's not showing, as in that screenshot, Ctrl+L will make it appear. If you are a keyboard fan, you shouldn't have much trouble hitting one extra keystroke.

For a Save dialog, you don't even have to hit Ctrl+L; it's only the Open dialog that defaults to mouse-only operation.

I know they're attempting to appeal to inexperienced users, but they always seem to (1) do so in a way that pisses off experienced users, and (2) botch things up in the inexperienced-user case anyway.

During the months of discussion and testing before this release, did you provide any feedback to help them? If not, then perhaps you might want to hold back a bit on the abuse directed towards the GTK developers.

Hopefully someone will come up with a less crappy file-selector and all the major distros (at least debian) will use it.

Hey, it's free software. Fire up your favorite image editor, and start mocking up how it should look. I'm sure OSNews would publish an article about your new design, and I'm sure that someone, somewhere in the world, would code up a prototype for you. Or you could even code it yourself!

As for me, I am content with the new dialog and I'm looking forward to its arrival in Debian Unstable.

steveha

Overated my ass.
Try reading this.
Moderators:The Slashdot equivalent of a patent examiner.

If you want to help Gnome 2.6, then you are in luck! The Beta release is here and it needs testing

More details here

Don't forget to report the bugs!

In related desktop linux news, Gnome 2.6 beta 1 has just been released. Its got that new file dialog that everyone has been waiting for, so go and get it!

full details here

Not to mention OSNews.com

Eugenia did a review of KDE 3.2-beta2 a while back. It was actually quite spot-on. As a KDE user, disagree with her ideologically on some points (eg. the configure menu comment) but on the whole I think it was a balanced evaluation of KDE, from a traditional UI designer's point of view.

Here's who I was talking about.

Disclaimer: I am not the author of the following post, I took it form here.

I believe this is not too far from what you can achieve with user mode linux. We've been using similiar technology in unix classess at school using uml.

There are however few differences:

1.) Solaris accesses host filesystem, while in user mode linux, you have to provide file or block device with disk image it will use. This is quite bad, because you have to preallocate space for zones. There is a project that aims to allow this, but I don't know how usable is this. You could of course overcome this by doing Root FS on NFS and dhcp and letting the guest os mount host's partition via NFS. This would probably have quite significant performance overhead though :(. Filesystem in filesystem is not very optimal too.

2.) It is not that easy to setup. This could be done with few scripts. I would love Debian and possibly other distros to have scripts, which would instantly create the zone's filesystem. Preferably, it would allow for some sharing (f.e. creating hard links to original data and kernel would unlink, copy transparently if slave wants to write -- some equivalent of copy on write seen in memory management).

3.) The networking is not so easy to setup. Could be also part of the script

4.) Linux does not have so well done resource allocation as Solaris. So the guest kernel should be able to limit itself (f.e. not to use more than 30% of cpu time). Is it possible to do some precise resource allocation under Linux (maybe using some patch to kernel, or something like that?)

Its not offtopic, just because micheal is a Debian fanboy and rejected by submission doesent mean its offtopic! Get it now!

Get it now! Now with Pre compiled packages and Knoppix support!

Get it before its trashdotted1

there's a nice article on OSnews which looks back on the whole XFree86 affair of past year ...

Microsoft thinks about realoading Windows XP (like Win98 SE) so if they would recalculate, even the Microsoft Plan would have to change, too.

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft Corp., appears to take delight in the troubles that Munich is having as it switches 14,000 city computers from Windows to a rival Linux operating system.

Don't forget that 80% of the Linux computers in Munich run Windows on VMWare. But they don't mention that in the article, of course, which is intentionally written to make Linux look bad.

What version of Mandrake didi he use? What are the exact models of the hardware it didn't detect? USB mice have been supported for ages for example. If you havnet tried Mandrake 9.2 or 10.0 then try again. Windows 95 would probably wouldnt work either, but does that mean that Windows 95 IS TOO HARD?

You may like to also try another distribution. Such as Knoppix. Knoppix has top class hardware support and doesnt need installing.

Windows XP dosent support my hardware, it BSODs when I plug my AGFA easypix camera into my computer, Mandrake pops up a disk on my desktop, and so does all the other Linux distros. My 52 year old mother can't figure out Windows XP, but she loves linux, and she uses it to play her games and online banking!

You may also like to report the non-detected hardware to Mandrake QA.

Here are some more links to back up my claim!

So try and get your Neighbour to try Linux again, tell him that its improving all the time!

What version of Mandrake didi he use? What are the exact models of the hardware it didn't detect? USB mice have been supported for ages for example. If you havnet tried Mandrake 9.2 or 10.0 then try again. Windows 95 would probably wouldnt work either, but does that mean that Windows 95 IS TOO HARD?

You may like to also try another distribution. Such as Knoppix. Knoppix has top class hardware support and doesnt need installing.

Windows XP dosent support my hardware, it BSODs when I plug my AGFA easypix camera into my computer, Mandrake pops up a disk on my desktop, and so does all the other Linux distros. My 52 year old mother can't figure out Windows XP, but she loves linux, and she uses it to play her games and online banking!

You may also like to report the non-detected hardware to Mandrake QA.

Here are some more links to back up my claim!

So try and get your Neighbour to try Linux again, tell him that its improving all the time!

How is some article by Eric Raymond any different than some OSSpews, article, or some stupid blog?.
Someone says something cool once, or does something interesting once, and they're brought into the geek pantheon forever? Show me the money, or show me the code, or shut up. This is arguably a Troll or Flamebait post, but can someone explain how a non-Linus, non-Andre Hedrick, non-Theo Whatshisname, still gets legitamized?

clicky

Speed bonus?

From what you just said, I can instantly assume you are using a lot of trigonometry. :-)

Yeah, whatever, dickweed.

Thank you, Mr. Cut-and-Paste (7th comment down).

And today we already have the PowerPC G5.

If your definition of 64-bit is a 32-bit operating system around a 64-bit chip, then the G5 is a 64-bit platform. Mac OS X 10.2.7 (and the upcoming 10.3) is not a 64-bit operating system. This is particularly frustrating because Apple's marketing machine has very carefully crafted their message to make a reasonable person believe the operating system is 64-bit, especially if you download and read Power Mac G5 Tech Overview (PDF). Apple says about the G5 version of Mac OS X that it runs all of your software -- and runs it faster -- with a version of Mac OS X Jaguar specially tuned for the PowerPC G5 processor, providing a seamless transition to 64-bit power. That's only the beginning of the smoke and mirrors. The 64-bit power only gives users two things: the operating system can address up to 8GB of RAM, though user programs are still limited to 4GB, and some of the G5 numerical hardware is available with a special version of GCC (3.3).

On Intel Xeons, noless. That said, they built it signficantly before the G5 Desktop and the G5 XServe were available. No offense, but much as I want a G5 and like the look-and-feel of Mac OS X, you have to admit that a bunch of overheating 1GHz G4's were significantly less cost effective than a similar bunch of P4 Xeons at the time the render farm was built.

Now wait just a gosh-darn second here! Who you callin "overheating"??

PowerPC chips use MUCH less power than Xeon. Tons less. In fact, that's what the PPC architecture was designed for was embedded applications.

Overheating G4's????

I know I'll be seen as a troll for this, but I have to ask.

Why do so many people worship this one guy? OK, he invented to Mac... it was twenty years ago. Then again, others have done great things and aren't worshiped as he is. Is this because he is such an egomaniacal elitist control freak?

Since 1984 he has done some good things (NeXT, the first iMac, OS X), but a lot of really bad ones.In the meantime, the Mac's marketshare fell below 2% and has been overtaken by Linux Desktop's share.

Lots of people agree that the real reason of the Mac slow but sure descent into Hell is Job's elitist vision and its results, overpriced hardware, rumor cult(ure) at Apple, etc.

Today the guy seems more interested in selling online muzak than selling less-than-$2000 computers. iMac's and eMac 's used to be nice, but please! It's 2004 and this hardware has lived.

The computer and (especially!) Mac lover in me is really hurt by his policy. Am I alone?

You HAVE to be a newb who doesn't know any better... or perhaps you're a troll. Either way, check here for benchmarks that disprove your complaint that Java is slow. It may be ugly on the client (though only if left to SUN) but it is definitely NOT slow.

.NET performs *MUCH* better than Java.

You may want to check this out. Java beats .Net in all categories except trig calculations.

Sadly, the cross-platform promise of Java, especially for GUI desktop applications, was never realized.

Since you admitted you're a former C++ and now a .Net developer, I don't think you're qualified to make this statement. I've developed Java apps for 6 years and I haven't seen any cross-platform problems for at least the last 5 years. I'll agree with you that Swing sucks, but SWT or wx4j gives you native look & feel and native performance and cross-platformedness. So I think that even if you are developing a client side app, there is no reason not to use Java. Why lose the 10% or so Linux/Mac users when Java is just as good as .Net for client side development?

The court's findings on details like that are trumped by Novell's instructions to The SCO Group to waive their claims against IBM. Any SCO wailing-and-gesticulation after that is kind of pointless, at least in legal terms.

IBM is free to donate whatever it pleases out of Dynix and AIX to whomever it pleases, as long as that code was not in the original System V codebase.

But... the original System V code is based on code which in the earlier USL-vs-BSD case was in the judge's opinion Public Domain, so even if code was copied from System V, there is still an obligation on SCO to prove that any copied bit wasn't in the Public Domain anyway, and that they didn't release it themselves.

The SCO Group really are seriously up the creek in a barbed-wire nowey sans paddle. And the counterclaims haven't been addressed yet.

OSNews.com has a story about how Palm dropped the Palm desktop for Apple, but as I understand it, there are better programs for synching on that platform. I don't believe that Palm Desktop has ever been very popular on the Mac.

"In fact, the ONLY people who have had a problem with things regarding the GPL are a few random users on Slashdot."

You're really attempting to whitewash the situation. Nearly every news story I see on the Internet about SkyOS, there are numerous people who express their concern about the use of GPL software. For example, at OSNews, a recently posted story contains such hopes that the situation of GPL use or misuse will become clear.

My personal recommendation is to either make the entire OS licensed under the GPL, as otherwise it will look like you are hiding something, or stop using GPL software, which exists to eventually overcome proprietary software's damage to society, which unfortunately you are only propagating.

...before conquering anything on the desktop.

From an OSNews review of Fedora Core 1:

"My disappointment started when I tried to upgrade Gaim 0.71 to 0.72. The third party Shrike RPM wouldn't work because of pspell dependancy problems. Downloading pspell and compiling it manually wouldn't work either as libpspell-modules were nowhere to be found in the newly compiled archive. So I decided to download the source of Gaim and compile it myself. All went fine with Gaim's compilation except the MSN plugin wouldn't load because gnuTLS that provides SSL to Gaim was not installed. I got to gnuTLS' FTP site downloaded the source, only to ask me for libcrypt. Downloaded the source of libcrypt, only to ask me for the source of GnuPG. I downloaded the gnupg, compiled fine, went back to libcrypt, only to bail out badly with severe compiling errors. This is a simple user scenario that should have not happened, no matter whose fault really is. Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole --literally-- usability fiasco."

This is the sort of crap Slashdotters just accept blindly, because they think people have the time to spend setting things up as a hobby. News flash--unlike you, people have lives and just need to use the computer to get things done. They don't want to be like the Gentoo weenies who "compile" everything, or the Red Hat weenies who think everything is magically solved just because you have an RPM system.

here's a copy of this evolving troll^W post.