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Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election
daria42 writes "A record low voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that two-thirds of the candidates have not yet cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"."
MEPIS, Ubuntu, Xandros? All three are based on Debian and a bit easier to use.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ Try it, you'll like it. Much of Debian's developers are working on Ubuntu - you'll see them in Ubuntu's IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, etc.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
This vote is not open to the public -- just to Debian developers. So I am guessing they are all aware of the election.
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
That's an old myth.
Debian was a pain in the ass to install ages ago, but since at least a couple years the installation process is way easier and fast.
I care. So does anyone looking for a comprehensive and stable distribution of Linux!
I was trying to decide which distro to install for a friend's wife who, and I quote, wants "Linux on my computer because I'm sick of Windows crashing!" I was going to pick one of the more colorful and intuitive distros for her, even though I use Debian myself. Package management is obviously important. I'd like to direct her to RPMs or something rather than going over there to compile from source. Much had changed since I last looked a couple years ago:
1. SuSE: Gone and re-branded as Novel Linux Desktop. Now it's all tailored for business.
2. Mandrake: Used to be my second choice, but now you have to pay to get most of the enticing features included. Three CDs for free version, and six CDs for paid version.
3. Linspire: Free unless you want to use the built in package management system. Then you have to pay for it.
4. Red Hat: Gone. I hear Fedora Core is good. Nice that they gave us the free version, but it doesn't have near the support or attention that Red Hat does.
5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope...
The truth is that Debian is still totally free and offers the strongest package management out there. Anyone who actually uses Linux, no matter what distro, understands that Debian is important.
It's way too easy to accidentally screw the system up. I'm running a mostly "x86" box, with a few select packages using "~x86" for newer versions. Somewhere along the lines, something went wrong to the tune of I can't successfully emerge -u world without it breaking. The current biggie is gtk+ 2.6.2, which won't compile and spits out an imlib error. imlib is installed, and imlib2 (which appears to be what it really wants) also errors during emerge.
So yeah. My gentoo server box at home is fine, running a very strict "x86" package set, but once you start tweaking a little bit, who knows...
"5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope..." One hyphenated word for that slapt-get. Any Debian user should be comfortable with that format.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov
Strange, there was a link to this article on the front page of /. about two weeks ago. To quote
That doesn't sound all tailored for business - not that it's not suitable for business, but SuSE Pro remains a fantastic all round distro, with a guaranteed two year shelf life and a huge selection of packagaes. Novell have a preview of what will be included in SuSE 9.3 hereIn-N-Out Buger's menu consists of *nothing* but burgers, fries, and shakes, all of the highest quality...
No. The goal of the Debian Project is to build an OS. It happens that the way their project works actually makes it great as a base for building other distros, but AFAIK that's not their stated goal (and it's not what their website says).
:).
If that's changed over the last few years, well, I've been away
Game... blouses.
only 199 of 960 active developers had voted -- well down on the 315 who had cast ballots at the same stage last year.
1) Debian is not a company
2) They don't need to "stir up interest". Only developers vote
3) Releases "when it's ready" does not mean those releases are not usable right now.
4) The project leads can't hand over the developers. The developers hand their time over to whoever they damn well please.
Thanks for playing.
gentoo: bleeding edge, lots of devs unfortunately like it on thier desktops which feeds the upgrade treadmill for everyone else.
ubuntu: seems nice but they push the ooh fuzzy everyone be nice kids look too much (just look at the login screen picture on thier frontpage) and they only support a tiny subset of debians architectures.
debian woody is getting a little old by linux disto standards (though its still newer than winxp)
also i'm pretty sure that most of the more obscure software ubuntu ships is just the debian packages anyway. just because some guys decided to put out an unofficial release with some packages of thier own for a few of debians targets does not undermine the packaging work that debian is doing behind the scenes.
I agree, unfortunately. I've seen some packages that just have no business being released - the original packager threw something together in 10 minutes then went AWOL and ignored all the bug reports.
eg. Bug 280859. The packager forgot to package the runtime library FFS. 138 days old. Unfixed.
There's just no quality control on the packages, and that brings the whole distro down.
I had one instance where some clown had packaged a dev package so that it pulled in most of gnome 2. The library wasn't GUI related, the include files definately weren't GUI related... it was down to one optional binary that few people used anyway... I suggested weakening this to 'suggests' as it made the library essentially unusable to me (since to compile my app people would have had to install 50MB of junk) and just a got torrent of abuse back from the maintainer telling me I was 'stupid' for not having gnome (on my headless fileserver with no X).
Couple that with the X debacle (where debian is usually 6-12 months behind in releases, even in unstable) and I'm really looking for something better... unfortunately there are few other server distros out there (especially not using apt, which I wouldn't do without having tried others).
Won't make any difference, as the Ubuntu mail client doesn't set the 'execute' bit in the permissions.
windows XP is $100 not $1000
Plus all the applications: word processor, spreadsheet, image editor, ... (also windows XP is around $300 in Australia)
Oh, yeah? You mean you can play those great activeX game on those cool website? You can use this great new GDI printer that was on sale (i.e. five time less than a postscript one)?
Typical home users don't care about activeX games (only geeks). I've got a Dell GDI printer working on Ubuntu okay.
Oh... That's why! Ubuntu is a bad choice for your father, but this is what YOU want...
Seems to me it is a good choice for both of them.
For the typical home user, linux is a nightmare and XP is well worth those $100.
The facts (see above) don't support this assertion.
This is just plain ridiculous. Kde 2.2.2 is NOT -- by FAR -- more 'stable' than KDE 3.4. Same with the new Gnome and just about everything that runs on X.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
And by the time his father has bought Photoshop, Illustrator, and Microsoft Office, how much as he paid? Lets be generous and say that the missing features in the Linux equivalents are worth half the price. Still sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
Those ability to play those great activeX games is also known as "Open Invitation for Viruses and Spyware". So, given the feature/misfeature balance, I'd have to say that the inability to play them is a feature. The only reason 'average Joe' doesn't think the same is that he doesn't understand that there's a link between those two things.
As for printer support, you're pretty sadly misinformed. It's pretty easy to get a non-Postscript printer working with Linux. I've walked many people through doing it with even old versions.
Free tech support is worth its weight in gold. If his father can get it by using Linux when he can't use Windows, I say use Linux.
You're probably a troll anyway.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Try installing it from CDs on a 2 year old PC. Ain't going to happen since Debian (I used sarge unstable) is trying to install on a 10 year old PC.
Thats:
;-)
apt-get install vote
Ya Gentoo freak!
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
A big part of the problem is that they guy that a *lot* of users and developers would like to see run didn't...Long live Overfiend.
What are you talking about? Branden's running.
I am terribly sorry if anyone believes this. It was just a copy & paste from a GNAA troll about FreeBSD with a few find and replaces... pretty much karma whoring.
But it's definitely true that Debian is stagnant. In OpenSource you have to compete to be number #1
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Actually he is right. Ubuntu just uses the debian-installer project for their installer. Ubuntu has better hardware detection, but that has nothing to do with the installer.
Strange, I had no trouble with RC2 of the debian-installer. I think it may have been RC1 that flaked out on me once, but I've done a few software raids with RC2, no problems to report (I cannot say anything about LVM however, haven't tried).
From the Debian security FAQ:
Q: How does testing get security updates?
A: Security updates will migrate into the testing distribution via unstable. They are usually uploaded with their priority set to high, which will reduce the quarantine time to two days. After this period, the packages will migrate into testing automatically, given that they are built for all architectures and their dependencies are fulfilled in testing.
Two days isn't exactly bad going. About 3 pico-Microsofts, I'd say ;-)
What would Lemmy do?
The day that debian dies would be a sad day for the OSS community and the linux community as a whole. Debian a very very nice distribution however for a while now it seems like it's lacking a stron leader and this results in insanelly long times between releases and very strange decisions from the development team. The notorious no java and no xorg thing are really hurting debian. And as a result Ubunty came arround a picked up a buck of the developers that were starting to get frustrated with debian. So it was right that the elections show that there is a serious problem with the way the project is going. But then again like I have said before OSS is about the best project surviving and this is exactly what's happening with Debian and Ubunty. After all in order for any project to survive you have to be devoted to it and not treat it as your 2nd hobby. Debians lack of release scedule has been hurting it for years now and the results are really showing now that there is actually a good alternative. I don't like some of the decisions that the Ubuntu team makes (like jumping head over heals in new versions of project) however the truth is that Ubuntu has been the fastest growing linux distribution over the last year and things are looking really good for the project. They have finally gotten the debian things to work like they do in linux and despite the fact that they use sudo and Gnome 2.10 (which both are really pissing me off) Ubuntu is a very good distribution and a lot better option than runnig unstable Debian which breaks stuff a little bit too often for mu taste. But don't count debian out just yet. There is a plan for speeding up the release schedule by dropping a lot of the architectures ( or turning them into sub projects) and other things like that. Debian has survived for a very long time and hopefully these elections will be a wakeup call for the dev team. If not I would have to switch to Ubuntu despite all the small *problems*.
Please, people: stop the panic. T'was only one year ago that Debian was the "fastest growing distribution"[1] according to the almighty Netcraft.
And all of a sudden it's dying?
Please....
Kind regards...
Maarten
[1] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/01/28/debia n_fastest_growing_linux_distribution.html
now there are more servers running Fedora Core or FreeBSD... Sorry, but I had to tell you that... Debian is dying!