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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"."
... Debian is dying. (It had to be done.)
And the counting will be done in florida .... yay !!
Debian is dying jokes in... 3... 2... 1...
No one cares.
No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)
A blog like any other.
I hate to say it, but...
Maybe it's because nobody cares anymore? (Not that that's my opinion, just an observation.)
Is it something easier to use I might understand and be able to install myself?
My little site.
Thats because nobody cares. But it made front page news anyway!! :)
I, for the 199 voters, welcome our Debian Project Leader.
When nobody votes, it means that all the candidates
are equally good. (or equally bad, but lets' be
optimistic)
No matter the results, few will be upset.
I'm not seeing a problem here.
If it is online voting then maybe they just didn't know and this post (I assume they all read Slashdot) will remind them. It's to bad because Debian is one of/the most important distributions out there because of all the forks that depend on it, like Ubuntu.
I think it has something to do with the fact that its debian. A lot of the debian users I know have switched to other systems in the last year or so. A lot of them are trying gentoo lately. I have no numbers to back any of that up, just an observation.
They need to push a bit more towards newer technology and less an stability. Personally I've had trouble with it the few times I've tried simply because everything they had on the cd was outdated. I'm not sure if thats just me not understanding the update but...
there's 3 weeks to vote. 1 week (and 30 whole minutes) have passed. That leaves 30 minutes less than 2 weeks to go.
any chance people will simply vote within the final 2/3 of the time alloted? No mention if this is the lowest turnout after 1/3 the time had past, or if she's comparing 3/3rds of the other times with 1/3 of the time this year...
Given some of their ultraconservative politics towards including software (I mean, if you have to compile newer versions of code because the distro has years old stuff that's no-longer supported -- in essence recompiling the entire distro) this comes as no suprize.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
On a serious note, maybe the way they setup the project has more to do with this lack of enthusiasm.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I voted for Kodos.
zzz
..Debian is dying, Netcraft comfirms it.
They're using Diebold's voting machines.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The voting body is simply taking as much time to select a new project leader as they do to get new releases out.
The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.
I'm not necessarily saying they should release more, and there is certainly a benefit to stability over many releases in a lot of computing enviornments, but we're hardwired to be attracted/interested in the newest, flashiest and best things (advertisers don't spend billions of dollars a year because they have too much money). So it stands to reason that no releases means declining interest.
Maybe a new distro once in 3 years might help kindle a little enthusiasm.
Mandrake users are trying out gentoo because they think compiling something makes them 1337. Debian users are still using debian, we just don't care about political nonsense. Package the damn software, I don't care who has what title.
In North Korea, only dead people cast votes via Diebold.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Who cares what person I don't know has what meaningless title I don't care about? Just package software in a convienient manner to create an OS. I think they used to call these bundles of software with linux kernels "linux distributions". That sounds like a better thing to spend time on than elections and circle jerks.
Let's face it: Debian just isn't very glamorous, and open source relies to a certain extent on glamor. You need to have regular, exciting releases that deliver better experience to users, and baseline Debian is about as far from doing that as any of the top 10 distributions out there.
Put another way, the only real reason that distributions like Ubuntu exist is because of frustration at the slow, plodding pace of Debian development.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
linspire is the best distro by far. and it seems that debian members have taken notice and no longer care about there own distro. It takes 20 minutes to install linspire and two days to install debian.
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
Debian is bloated. I personally know 2 or 3 "developers" that can't even program a linked list in C, who package small insignificant apps, but have the same voting rights than other true developers. This turned Debian a huge, sluggish, amorphous organization, unable to reach consensus, unable to work, ever stuck in the morass of debate.
The FreeBSD model is much better in this respect. Because you package or port something, it doesn't not mean you get to say where the project is going. "Thou shalt not commit bikesheds", the saying goes. The FreeBSD (and others) are solid and going ever forward. In the BSDs, it's like in the Linux kernel: meritocracy, not democracy. And as Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD) makes clear crystal clear (to those that read their lists), it is not one man, one vote. There is a vision and a method. In Debian, sadly, all that remains is the vision. Their method failed. Ubuntu proves the point.
Debian would do best to review this whole developer process thing. Trouble is, bound by democracy, the tyranny of the majority, this will never pass.
Therefore, it's a good thing if hundreds of those "developers" actually abstain.
People have left in mass, that is why. The lack of releases have driven people away who want the latest stuff. While most people don't need/want a Gentoo bleeding edge install, they want new releases. When other large distros are releasing every 6 months, people go to greener pastures.
Mabie they need to examine their place in the overall scale of things. Mabie they should focus on what they are best at: providing a base for other distros.
John 3:16 - The easiest way to a BETTER YOU.
Can an election get slashdotted? Is that the intention of posting the story on /. ?
The ballots were printed with BSD instead of Debian by mistake. Only the dead are eligible for voting in those elections.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Debian failed to release Project Leader on time, film at 11
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Debian developer Manoj Srivastava only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Debian is dying.
All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.
Fact: Debian is dying
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Maybe this is because most of Debian's userbase has gotten tired of the sickly release schedule and glitchy package management, and moved on to other distributions like Gentoo?
Aside from being very easy to keep up to date, Gentoo's documentation, organization, configuration file management, dependency/build management, package handlings, init scripts, and so forth are so much better than anything else out there right now, I don't know why anyone would want to use anything else.
This space intentionally left blank.
When was the laste stable release?
McDonalds certainly wouldn't have had the success it has had if it merely stuck to the original menu, which was simply hamburgers, fries and shakes; that's it.
You need to give the people new stuff to keep their appetites wet.
Heck, it's been so long since the last stable release, people might have simply thought Woody was it!
Sugapablo
I moved to Fedora Core (currently at 3) plus extra stuff from freshrpms and atrpms. apt has been ported to Debian, so you can use "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get install whatever; et cetera". It really works well.
My other first post is car post.
Personally, I like Debian. It's stable. It's got a nice support base. But it got to the point that I needed more current kernels and features and was too lazy to roll my own on top of Debian.
I ultimately settled on CentOS and haven't looked back.
Here's a hearty good luck to Debian and thanks for all the fish!
I think it's just that debian users like to keep true to form and will vote when every other GNU\Linux distribution votes for their respective team leaders.
apt get vote
...when some code is released.
that there isn't much difference between the Debians and the Redhats.
Oops, wrong election...
---
This post brought to you by the provisional governement of the United States.
Not the general public.
One reason for the low turnout could be the same reason for the percieved lack of Debian attention to "customers" (like the accustations leveld against Gnome). If the developers aren't interested, they dont work on it. Kinda like Gnome.
Possible reasons that developers must be "staying away in droves" (Yogi Berra) maybe because:
A) they dont see any real impact/difference to whoever gets elected,
B) else they arent working on Debian all that much since its such a slowly developed platform and most devs want to work closer to the leading edge
Both of which mean they just dont care who gets voted in.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I believe there is a trend setting in here with the linux market, and it can be viewed as either something positive or negative, depending on your perspective. To me it is the answer why Debian isn't necessarily as popular as it once was.
Linux has been maturing steadily over the years, and it is beginning to take the shape of something viable for a casual user. It certainly isn't there yet, but there have been notable strides. As linux continues forth, it will only get closer and closer to being a very intuitive system.
That being said, I compare Linux to the likes of computer graphics. There was a stage where it just wasn't "there yet", and graphics clearly looked pasted on. This was fine because our mind said "hey, that's a graphic!", and we could easily tell what it was. Today, for the most part, we can only tell if something is a graphic because we know what is possible and what is not possible. Nothing is exceptionally glarring. Take a look at LotR, the graphics were incredibly seamless and only someone looking at them from a "possible" standpoint could truely make out the difference.
However, there was a stage in between these two levels, I liken to the example of the Final Fantasy movie, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The graphics were good, but not perfect. Our minds went from "Hey, its a graphic!" to "I guess that's kinda real", and we got confused. It winds up being confusing and awkward for us to watch, because we cannot get out minds to sort out what the heck we are seeing.
Linux is on that stage right now. It was previously something for the elite, it was difficult to use, it was extremely console based and you had to manually enter everything. I recall for the longest time needing to enter in my monitors horizontal and vertical refresh rates, plus then manually specify what resolutions my monitor could do, additionally state the size of my video card's ram. It was as elitest as operating systems really got, and we understood that.
Today, we find ourselves in the middle. Its not quite as plug and play as Windows or Macintosh, but its got some. Our minds are left thinking "Is this mainsteam or not?", and we don't know where to settle. Fedora installs the video drivers well for me the first time, but it was a nightmare getting Limewire to work.
So how does this relate? Well, because Linux isn't exclusively seen as an elitest operating system as much anymore and transitioning into something a little on the brain to use, we're seeing the depature of people from "Middle of the Road" distributions. Gentoo has its niche for the hardcore, but most distributions will attempt to make life as easy as possible for the user, a la Fedora or SUSE. They are trying to remove that middle ground and place themselves firmly into the "easy to use" category, while still retaining the power and flexibility Linux inherantly offers.
Those that did use Debian and the sort are moving on, they don't see the need for the elitest economy as much anymore, as Linux itself isn't as unique and hardcore as it once needed to be. We begin to see users use Linux not just to experiement on, but to actually use in a working environment, something to be taken a little more seriously.
In the end, the flourishment of distributions will begin to phase out, and personally I believe its for the better. We will be left with a handful, but those handful will have the attention of a much larger user and developer base, rather than having them spread thinly out. In the end, I believe this is a good thing. It looks like Debian may perhaps be one of the first examples.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
I thought they stopped doing releases...
(sorry, I really wanted it to come... to me, Debian is over)
Debian deserves a little respect and for good reason! I started out on Debian and continue to use it to this date on a number of systems(not all). Please vote!
Linux blog http://nsajeff.com/blog
Your sig induced fear in me. Fear and surprise. The two things your sig invoked were fear, surprise and uncertainty. Three! Three things your sig invoked were fear, surprise, uncertainty and an AC posting.
Ahem. Amongst my many reactions to your sig were such diverse elements as fear, surprise, a ruthless dedication, um, er...can I post this again?
It appears that the root cause of the low voter turnout in the most recent election of a leader for the Debian project is that all of the potential voters are still compiling the latest version of Firefox on their Gentoo boxes and are unable to access the Internet to submit their votes.
If Bush cheated, it was through kicking Democrats off the voter rolls.
So, between the fact that not only is Debian getting publicly ridiculed by leaders of the Free Software Movement (such as Bruce Parens, IIRC) for the lenth of time it's taken them to release Sarge; but now they can't even stir up enough interest to get people to vote for posistions inside their own company?
I love Debian, and I used to use it before I switched to OpenBSD, but I honestly wonder if the project shouldn't hand over their resources to a vibrant and living project such as gentoo or ubuntu and step aside gracefully.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
In-N-Out Buger's menu consists of *nothing* but burgers, fries, and shakes, all of the highest quality...
the choosing smells wors3 than a fear the reaper
It was last September if I remember right when they were saying Sarge would be released. Well it still hasn't hit stable yet, granted I'm using it in production and I haven't hit too many problems (I have had some problems).
:)
Debian's releases are held up by trvial packages. Who cares if joe joe's penguin parade isn't stable, don't hold up the whole release of sarge because of it.
Also, the few bugs I've found and reported have been written off as not worthy of fixing because they've been bugs for so long that some people might rely on them. WTHBBQ?!
Debian is an extremely stable and comprehensive distribution but it needs some TLC from real world people that have a clue about what's going on around them rather than only the things right in front of them. But hey it's free software, without warranty or expectations so they could shovel piles of poo onto a plate and I'd eat it smiling.
If they want high voter turnout, they need to put an ammendment on the ballot to ban gay packages.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
Pity that Debian is losing market share, etc. The package management system is hands down the best of all the linux distros out there. Fedora is catching up quick though, with it's Yum/apt support. I used Debian for a while before switching to Fedora. I made the switch because of the slooooooooooooow release cycle and out of date packages.
>1. SuSE: Gone and re-branded as Novel Linux Desktop.
That's totally wrong, Suse is as strong as ever(Changed the way they write their name tho:-) Novel Linux Desktop is a new rebrand geared towards business users, as Novel hopes their name will entice new corporate users. The effect of all this are NLD mostly get the new customers, while the already existing corporate customer of Suse continue to run the Suse brand.
You're right... :-)), but I can see why people got elated.
I guess Debian's problems are more serious than is usually assumed. Maybe it's fair to say they're dying. No joke. In critical state, at least. I guess everybody was just so giddy-up with Ubuntu, nobody ever paused to give it much thought. I personally don't use Ubuntu (I changed Debian for OpenBSD, the only true Free distro out there (TM), I shit you not
Sad, but I guess it all started with the wrong model for package management, and then the wrong social model. You end up in tangles.
Somebody mod the parent up!!!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
my money's on deb, but ian is still within striking distance, according to the latest poll.
put your efforts into helping patrick....
Linux is run by a benign dictator. This model often works quite well, even for countries.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
this proves it. people arent as interested in computers as you fucks think.
only 199 of 960 active developers had voted -- well down on the 315 who had cast ballots at the same stage last year.
I went to the Debian website, but I didn't find where to cast my vote.
Maybe that's why there are so few votes.
There's a rumour that Ubuntu's (technical) project leader Jeff Mallrow will jump on the Debian ship. Makes sense as Ubuntu is probably the best Debian distro.
Seriously though what I have seen is an exodus away from Linux on the Desktop and to Mac OS X. Instead of spending time developing Linux, developers are spending more time on developing FOSS on their Macs and deploying on Linux servers.
When it comes down to being productive, Mac OS X just makes sense for a lot of folks.
What does this mean and how should the Linux community respond? The reality of the situation for Linux is there are too many competing distributions and not enough focus(56 flavors and they all taste like chicken). Perhaps we will see some consolidation? Who knows?
People just want the damn distro! They don't want to be involved. We all have our OWN lives to lead here.
Just fscking get to work like the rest of us!!!!!!
Yeah. Woody. Debian is like waiting for the re-glaciation. There's ice growing on that there Woody.
I feel those of you that are bashing Debian are making several crittical errors. First, is the assumption that a stable release in a ditro like Fedora is equivelent to a stable relase of Debian. Debian stable actually MEANS something. Releases are made with a purpose, not on a set schedule. Second, the vanity associated with running the latest version of a packages goes away quickly as soon as you have a cittical system break. I see a lot of posts with people switching to Gentoo for their desktop...that's all fine and good but when you are responsable for several dozen servers (or more) your perspective on packages changes considerably. Lastly, you can't beat Debian stability with the power of apt. I can do inline upgrades of my Debian machines, that's more then the Fedora users can say...I'd have to go to each server and put the new CD in, then go through the whole setup cycle. There are a lot of things to consider when looking at Linux distributions, just because you don't understand your can't appreciate a distribution does not mean you need to post. After all, us Linux users are all on the same team right?
...but Debian voting requires me to be an official Debian member, or developer, or something-or-other, and they must have my PGP key on file beforehand, and lots of other I'm-not-good-enough-to-vote reasons.
I understand the need to prevent ballot stuffing (especially with a purely electronic voting boothe) but it's damn near impossible for mere mortals to vote, even though I'm active in the Debian community, contribute bug reports, run a data center with 50 Debian servers and my vote would probably be representative of a large portion of Debian users.
I think that's about as close to a rational explanation as you'll ever get.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Debian confirms it?
I'll cast my vote again when I'm good and ready, and only once it's been ported to twelve different platforms.
If this indicates that a significant number of people are moving to greener pastures, then I'd like to ask a question how alternative distros deal with a particular aspect of Debian I really liked...
/etc/X11, pretty good fonts setup (the best of all distros I'd used), etc, so that X would almost always work properly. This was in contrast to most other Linux distributions which seemed to throw all the X stuff together in a big heap and let the user make head and tail of it all.
I used Debian exclusively up until about a year or two ago (up until just before the XFree86 fork). Been on a Mac ever since.
One of the things that impressed me most was the way that X was packaged on Debian. It had a robust supporting infrastructure of scripts under
So I have a question: Which other dpkg/apt-based distributions have X packaged so nicely?
They are all busy emerging....
Now that this has been posted to /., will it be a dupe when they post a new story in 5 minutes that says, "Debian leadership election receives highest turnout ever -- and Cowboy Neal wins!!"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Please number up to three candidates in order of preference
[ _ ] Miguel de Icaza
[ _ ] Linus Torvalds
[ _ ] Eric Raymond
[ _ ] William Henry "Trey" Gates III
[ _ ] Steve Ballmer
[ _ ] Vinod Valloppillil
[ _ ] Steve Jobs
[ _ ] Carly Fiorina
[ _ ] Andrew Tridgell
[ _ ] Rasmus Lerdorf
[ _ ] Jeff Waugh
[ _ ] Scott McNealy
[ _ ] D'Ohl MacBride
[ _ ] Alan Bond
[ _ ] Alexander Downer
[ _ ] Hilary Clinton
[ _ ] Jacques Chirac
[ _ ] Klaus Hauptman
[ _ ] Aldona Anisimovna
[ _ ] _____________________________ (add choices to taste)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
from the cathedral and bazaar, that OSS has a frequent release cycle compared to closed systems. This exposes bugs and fixes them quickly . . .
Debian seems to have deviated from the frequent releases that make other projects more exciting. Granted they put out stable systems, but maybe the slow release cycle has something to do with the lack of interest.
yeah yeah -1 redundant.
Honestly, I don't care. And I run Debian. People, the whole power of Debian lies in the fact I don't need to wait for a new release. I've been running Debian Testing on my servers for two years. I'm already running the next release. I couldn't stay on Woody. It got too old. I needed newer releases of PostgreSQL and Apache and others. So I made the decision to upgrade to testing and haven't had one problem on any of my 8 servers. Its no big deal if there isn't an updated release on a CD in my opinion. I can't stand installing from CD anyway. I've got SuSE Pro 9.2 and SuSE Enterprise 9 and Debian is far easier to administer and keep up to date.
It's not like it matters. It's only Linux. Or is that Debian/Gnu/Glinux/////////?
Oh fuckit. I'll just stick with OpenBSD.
We don't need to elect Theo. He's always there for us.
Actually, I've noticed our Linux group membership is dropping. I think people are finally getting over some of the BS hype of linux.
I was disappointed to see the generally negative view the community seems to have regarding Debian's future. A little background: I am an engineer (not a computer scientist / programmer / developer) that used Unix a good bit a number of years ago. To me, an OS is simply a platform to run desired applications (mathematical analysis, etc., along with general office software).
I didn't mind DOS, but have always hated being dependent on an insecure, unstable Windows - especially when Microsoft continuously decides that I don't really need backward compatability. I tried Linux about 5 years ago, and while I am sure that Linux would have provided an excellent computing platform, I didn't have the time needed to make it do the things I needed it to do. About a year ago, I came across Quantian (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html) - a distribution based on Debian - and got very excited about Linux again. So far, this is the only distro that I've come across with such a wide range of F/OSS scientific and engineering analysis tools.
I don't want to depend on any distro that is controlled by a large commercial enterprise (Novell - Suse, Red Hat Fedora, etc.), because the time may eventually come when they decide that supporting a free distro is no longer in the company's best interest. (I still have bad memories of how Novell let WordPerfect languish to the point that it went from 85% of the wordprocessing market to almost nothing before dumping it on Corel.)
Also, from the comments (today and previously) regarding Debian based distros like Ubuntu, Knoppix, Games Knoppix, etc., it seems that there will be a lot of disappointed people if Debian folds.
Here's to hoping that there will always be high quality F/OSS engineering and scientific tools easily available, and that there will always be a good Linux distro including them!
Shameless plug: Heard of Doctor's without Borders? Who hasn't! But how about Engineers without Borders? [http://www.ewb-usa.org/] A chance for those of us that don't write F/OSS to give back to the world community!
Oh wait, that's FreeBSD. Never mind!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Remember, Michael Moore is filming the elections.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Debian is dieing
Thanks for your well reasoned comment! Reading it, my mind said: Pling!! The effect you describe has been coined under the name "Uncanny Valley". Basically: 'not good enough to pass for the real thing', but past the stage where you can just laugh at it. That in-between can give an uncomfortable feel. I Googled a bit, but as often, Wikipedia has a good description. (poor Wiki getting pounded all the time ;-)
I'm not sure if you're right, but it's an interesting view. I myself think that plain inertia, and some 'fear of the unknown' plays a big role in Linux acceptance. And maybe people don't really hate Windows as much as they claim, but have sort of learned to love it, with all its quirks and/or blue screens.
Besides: Linux is about choice, and (too many) choices make people's heads hurt. Just handing over something, and saying: "use this, push that button, and that thingie there works like so from now on" works good for many people.
But from what I read, Linux keeps going strong, Mac use is up, and Firefox keeps eating IE market share. Makes me pretty optimistic.
(on distro's converging)
Couldn't agree more. Whenever you visit DistroWatch, maybe half the distro's out there, are somehow Debian-based (like Knoppix and its numerous variants). But many look like "me too!" projects. Choice is good, but only as long as there's something clear to choose between. Big or small, ready-to-go or advanced user, bleeding edge or server-farm stable, etc. It would be good if there were a handful of distro's with clearly visible (different) targets, but without the numerous look-alikes. I for one, will never touch a distro if it doesn't make a clear statement on what sets it apart from the rest.
You're right, this is just a matter of time, some shake-out/reshuffling will happen. Maybe even original Debian will get lost in this. But who cares? All the work done on it, lives on in its descendants.
Why are you reading this sig?!? Isn't my comment interesting enough, or what?
The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.
You sound like you are thinking about Debian like RedHat or Suse. But Debian works differently. A "real release" of Debian doesn't matter--people just get core Debian onto their computers in some way (live CDs like Ubuntu and Knoppix are particularly popular), and then upgrade to whatever level they feel comfortable with (stable+security, testing+security, unstable).
( Read More... | 87 of 213 comments | linux.slashdot.org ) Record low worthwhile comments?
I think you fundamentally mischaracterize Debian when you look at it as some kind of bleeding edge system for hackers and nerds.
Debian and its package management system is still the easiest way of keeping a software installation up to date, for anybody, hacker or not. SuSE and RedHat are trying, but they aren't as good or easy to use yet.
And Windows and Macintosh aren't even trying to do anything comparable--software installation and maintenance on those platforms is in complete shambles compared to Linux.
Or the fact that of the few people who can vote (under 1000), and likely most of them don't have a clue they can vote, or there lives don't revolve around debian enough to be worried theres an election on.
.. yes he's the leader of Debian. Though I think debian really needs a leader who stands up and puts debian on the map, instead of looking like a group of geeks who isn't really relevant to the rest of the world.
Has anyone even seen this guy: http://www.cyrius.com/
I had not yet voted when this announcement went out. (I have now, however.) The main reason I took so long to get my vote in is that the number of candidates (and the number of new candidates, since the incumbent isn't running) is higher than it has been in recent years, and I needed extra time to figure out who they all were, and how I thought they should be ranked. The last few elections, I had a fairly good idea of how I was going to vote before I even started looking at the candidates in detail. This year, it was a really tough choice, and I had to spend a lot more time on it. So, I wouldn't read too much into the low turnout at this point.
I really hate to say this, knowing that I'll be flamed and modded down, but if Debian would actually release something once in a while, it might help the project's image. I know they want their stuff to be the "best" but there is a rule in software: STFP - Ship The Product (the "F" is silent)... People appreciate that a lot more than just waiting until Real Soon Now (tm).
Debian is so American.
...they're running Debian Vote Stable.
They'll catch up with the current vote in two or three years.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Surely there's a candidate who is opposed to the reduction in the number of "released" architectures. And, if not, perhaps you should ask yourself: what is really wrong with releasing architectures separately then?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Your right, my bad. Sid not Sarge. But I still stand by my point. The longer it takes to release the less that will go into the "less stable" releases. And yea Ubuntu certainly does have the cash to hold on. But that was never the project's goal and Debian tanking like it is certainly isn't good for all the projects based off it.
Something has changed at Debian. Debian users have gone from touting Debian as a great distro to touting Debian as something to base your distro off of.
And just to point something out people are not upset that its been a few years since a release. They are upset because the project has run off the rails and is being totally mismanged. Users can excuse delaying a bit to "get things right", but you can't keep fucking up over and over and expect users to keep understanding why you can't manage to get a release out.
stop defending their lack of releases and admit it's a problem, then do something to fix it. anything makes you look like a bunch of idiots
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It must mean they're all busy getting the next stable release out!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
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
Go Gentoo!
FreeBSD. It's just as stable as Debian with the up-to-date-ness of Gentoo's portage. The only thing you won't have is nvidia drivers on amd64.
I haven't used the non-free repository in years. Or even the non-US. In fact, until you'd mentioned it, I'd forgotten about non-free.
It's not that I'm a DFSG-adhearing zealot. I'm not. Until about a month ago, I was stuck without an Internet connection at home since 2002, and the jigdo cds and dvds one can order online don't have those repositories on them.
It's interesting that one can get along without any of the packages in there, if one needs to.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Ok I use neither gentoo or Debian. I typically use suse or mandrake when I'm using linux, because I'm used to them. I'm pretty much at MacOSX for most of my development.
I looked into debian.. I have to be honest, its doesn't seem trivial to install. The documentation seemed less polished the gentoos.
The main reason to get debian is apt-get. Its a beautiful thing after living in rpm dependency hell. Now Mac has fink/darwin ports. Gentoo has emerge. There are others as well that do almost as good a job.
Also as more and more linux distros emerge, the mind share of each decreases. Especially since there are easier to install debian based distros out there.
I'm of the mind that it looks worse for debian than it is. People are apt-getting there way to happiness and not thinking much about it, and not having to download completely new distros.
linspire strongly encourages you not to run as root. Its target is the easy to instal crowd. I've tried it, recently. I thought it installed easy and worked pretty well. Cohesively even and for a desktop linux thats a strong compliment.
I would consider it if I every get another x86 machine (I gave the last one away)
Its funny cause its true...
Until recently I would've agreed with you on the matter of servers (running Debian stable for a desktop is IMO utterly hopeless).
My view recently changed when I realised that most of the system I was operating was from backports.org not Debian stable. To get some of the basics I needed I was having to go out to 3rd party repositories - ones with no guarantee of security support.
I agree with your view about ABI compatibility, but as a developer also understand why. That constant breaking of compatibility is one of the reasons open source software can develop so fast. Having to worry about working around a bugs and limitations in older versions of libtiff or libxml would be yet another slowdown. It's quite possible to install multiple versions of libraries in parallel, too, thanks to the soname versioning scheme in *nix, though few distributors package more than one version of a library.
It's not just ABI compatibility too, though, it's compatibility with "old bugs" and with API changes.
To be honest, it sounds a lot like what you want is FreeBSD. I've been tempted to try it out for similar reasons myself - dead stable, small "OS", easily upgraded extra userspace. That's pretty much what I want - like having "woody" for the core OS, but "sarge" for the rest, w/o the nightmares that entails when you try to do it on Debian (IMHO it's impressive they've made it work at all).
Backports could satisfy the same role - the "ports" collection in fbsd - but it doesn't seem to have all that much coverage or all that much enthusiasm behind it.
First of all, this isn't because Debian is a bad distro--it's actually very good.
It's also not actually because of the painfully slow release model that Debian uses. It's a problem, yes, but not THIS problem.
The problem is that software and OS development shouldn't be about politics and beaurocracy; and quite honestly, people are getting TIRED of the political aspect of the whole damned open source universe.
Write software. Release it according to whatever license you see fit. If you're spending any time at all worrying about election turnout or such things, then register a trademark, get a business license, and start making money. Just keep it all somewhere else.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Who cares about releases ? Debian is fantastic when you want stability. Since the beginning of 2002 I'm running woody on a workgroup server. The box is located some 500km away from my work premises, and all these years I've physically touched the box only 5 times (I rarely visit the place). Never a problem with Debian. No need to feed it cdroms (how old fashioned). Keeping the software up to date is so easy : just log on remotely and run 2 commands. The configuration changes you get with an upgrade are absolutely minimal, compare this to the likes of gentoo. I've
;-)
used gentoo last year on my desktop, and I must say I after a while I was terrified of ever doing an emerge: my machine would be bogged down with compiling the new software for hours on end, and
much worse were all the configuration details you had to enter/decide/judge.. (it's not the thinking that hurts, but all the time and effort it takes).
I was so happy and relieved switching back to debian sarge for my desktop machine.
Gentoo is a flashy toy for amateurs with too much time to spend. Debian is bulldozer for busy professionals.
While I generally agree with your views, I can't entirely agree on the matter of developers. In my view, in the context of the Debian distribution, a "developer" has quite a different set of required skills.
;-)
A Debian developer - think "person who develops packages for Debian" - needs to be able to work with the Debian packaging system, needs to know quite a bit about porting apps to different archs, and needs to be a build system wizard. They don't need to know how to write a linked list in C - but they might need to know how to correctly replace all str[something-weird]* calls with another flavour or fix assumptions in the upstream source that cause a dependence on Solaris's libc.
I know quite a few very good developers who could't make a package for any distro to save their life. I also know quite a few skilled package maintainers whose ability to fix others' code is often astonishing despite their relative lack of traditional programming expertise. I also know a fair few people (myself included) who think that if you're implementing a linked list, you need to get over your NIH syndrome and discover the wonder of libraries, and/or get a higher-level language
Overall - I'm not convinced "Debian developer" is the best title, when "package maintainer" is often more accurate, but many of these folks deserve the term Developer as much as whoever hacks out the original package.
Ah, drat - you're an AC anyway. May as well post this given that I've already written it.
... does that mean George Bush will become the next Debian Project Leader?
Its very simple. Only good thing about Debian was its apt-get package management system which was ported to most of the other distributions.
Debian Server users are moving to distributions that can be stripped down (Gentoo) or to other OS that are proven to be rock solid for these kind of things (*BSDs for example - only base system can be installed and only necessary utilities/programs can be installed on it. FreeBSD for example is a perfect OS for servers).
Desktop users are switching to SuSE and Fedora Core because debian just doesn't cut it. For everyday computer use you have to spend major portion of your time just to get the damn thing installed and configured. And then after that if you want to change something very simple, you have to do tons of work to get it done. This is just not acceptable for a workstation where you have to concentrate on your work instead of managing your box entire time. On other hand, you got SuSE that is all that a workstation should be. It comes working with everything right out of the box, its not bloated like Mandrake for example (it doesn't install 3 billion different editors for example). Its perfect for most people that do office work, students, professors (it comes with OpenOffice installed) and pretty much all the other people that just want to surf the web and do regular everyday computer stuff like that. While Fedora Core itself is not bad when it comes to desktop, its still way behind SuSE when it comes to automation of everything and to configuration tools. In my opinion SuSE is becoming a viable workstation alternative to Windows for everyday users, but also for power users. And guess what? SuSE also has huge apt-get repositories with tons of software. Just search for "suse apt-get" on yahoo or google. There arefew that are maintained by the SuSE developers (even though its not officialy supported by SuSE) but also you can get updates/security patches over apt-get or friendly interface called Yast.
Of course, Fedora Core also supports apt-get. And there are many repositories too, check out freshrpms.net.
To summarize, for a server, all the experianced techies will run a very strip down version of Gentoo or one of the rock-solid BSDs to get the highest performance and security out of servers. And for desktop/workstation use, it depends if a person is a techie or a plain masochist, then they will skip debian and go straight for Gentoo, Slack or one of the BSDs, or if they are normal people they will stick to something like SuSE or similar polished distributions.
Of course, at the end, there will always be die-hard zealot users that will not switch to a superior system even though it is very obvious. And of course there are always some militia people who will use it just because nobody else is using it so they can feel like they are bigger techies than the rest of us. If you don't know what I am talking about, join the OS/2 channel on any of the bigger irc servers.
debian is dead. deal with it. move along, there is nothing to see here.
one size fits all, but unfortunately this doesn't satisfy everybody.
One size fits all
Be you short or be you tall
Be you wide or be you slim
Be you her or be you him
Now, please, don't start to scream and yell
We never said it would fit well
KFG
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*.
Knoppix and Ubuntu are popular also.
Understatement of the week. Ubuntu is the top distro in distrowatch "page hit ranking" (with a big margin), if you look at the results in 3 month range.
The more Debian ignores the problems, and repeats that "everything is ok" (which Debian people often do), the more people will see that things are not going to change, get disillusioned, and switch away. The "only developers matter, Debian does not need users" attitude doesn't help either, even if it was true.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
"Debian Developers will vote when it is time".
OK , the above comment is a bit harsh , and I personnaly dont really like to use it , but you have to admit that a project which as started in the midle 70's , which dont have as many user and as much visibility as the GNU/Linux cant be better at doing things.
Beside Apple there is no one else installinga bsd solution and even Apple borrow from GNU/Linux manned and sponsored project.
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
Gentoo will suck twice as bad after Daniel Robbins is gone for a couple of years. Just thinking about the hoops to jump thru to get a gentoo install makes me wanna puke.
Ubuntu is immature.
Using a hd install of knoppix is like eating your own dog food.
Debian supports 11 architectures, maybe that doesn't count for anything.
I tried 'em all and I always come back to Debian..
Never shall I roam again.
Having to create a 64-bit AMD version and versions for other architectures must be slowing things down. They've dropped some platforms already.
Debian is dead. Ditch while you can. 'Best before' date has expired.
Welcome to UBUNTU LINUX! Ubuntu is an ancient african word and it means - Humanity to others!
Face the fact fanboy - DEBIAN IS DEAD, Ubuntu Linux rules!
Humanity to others!
That was well said. MOD UP!
Debian is dead. Move along, there's nothing to see here.
P.S. I suggest you who ditch Debian now will try Ubuntu Linux!
now there are more servers running Fedora Core or FreeBSD... Sorry, but I had to tell you that... Debian is dying!
there's no link to read more about the state of Debian... but if any of you isn't a Debian zealot and follows the "open source" will know that Debian is irrelevant now and is loosing market share; - that's why there are many Debian spin-offs.
-for an open source desktop there's Fedora Core (you can use apt and synaptic if you want to) and for servers there's FreeBSD, stable and not obsolete.
The hype was too much like the DotCom bubble. Not to mention Linux is a steaming pile of bloated, worthless code. I for one welcome Microsoft as our new overlords. At least they have the sense to write quality code. Now, fuck of and die, you damn LinSux Zealots.
I couldn't have put it better.
.. has his first priority set: make sure there is enough democratic participation, so the NEXT election will get more votes... So its probably a good thing to elect someone -new-.
Remember - you only have to install (debian/gentoo) once to be always up to date (create a backup of /dev/hda1 if you think your going to break it). Thats why i dont regret installing gentoo on my desktop (and my gf's desktop). it might have taken 3 days, but it was worth it in the end.
I installed debian sid netinstall in vmware the otherday, to try it out and it was very simple.
Simple. I don't have the time; even if I did, I should be spending it on more important things than building my own server OS from scratch. That becomes doubly so when maintaining a bunch of servers (I run four Linux servers currently).
Essentially, that's why there are Linux distros. Installing a Linux-based OS used to be very much as you describe - but distros like Yggdrasil appeared because that was *painful*. Sure, with faster computers now it's probably less painful (glibc sure hasn't grown apace with CPU speed, for example) but I'm still not convinced it's generally a good idea.
In addition to time, there's the small matter of security. Doing things the way you suggest means a lot of watching mailing lists for security alerts, upgrading bits of your servers in a hurry, etc. Distros are good not only at doing the watching for issues for you, but they even do the hard work of providing the fixes in a nice, won't-break-your-system form. I rather like this.
That's not to say there's not a time and a place for rolling your own OS from OSS components, just that I don't think it's a good idea for a production server. I've done it before - making a tiny uclibc based image to netboot machines with as part of an image-based installer - but it's not something I like to do if I can find a faster, simpler way.
The effect you mention can be achieved almost as well by dragging in the very stripped down core of a distro like Debian and building your apps on top of it. I used to maintain rather a lot of local builds of apps (Cyrus IMAPd and PostgreSQL in particular) but even for them I'm increasingly trying to just use packaged versions. One less thing to waste time on.
...it's ironic that the longest-lasting distro (Slackware) has largely been maintained by a single person and will last longer than a project that once had arguably the most developers and users of any distribution.
;)
Now let's start killing Gentoo
That's not even necessary. YaST can be set to use a mirror as an installation source, and so it automagically solves dependencies. Just a thought.
Nah - Ballmer. DEBIAN DEBIAN DEBIAN DEBIAN Wooooooo!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...all the b*tching and moaning about Debian comes down to them being too conservative in development and release cycles for the tastes of the *nix public when such lack of conservatism over at Redmond w/respect to code stability and so forth is something everyone in the *nix community continuously whacks at MS for.
Okay, so they're a little slow on this. But I'm (still) getting my cram introduction to *nix through two channels: OpenBSD which is used where I work and Knoppix which just plain works right out of the box (or CD tray more to the point). Knoppix works around Debian. No, no pun intended wiseasses.
What kind of cycle are we looking for anyways? The kind AOL was using on their client for the longest time where you blink and there's a revision? Do we want to mimic Windows, shove it out the door, and rely on autmated network installers to patch and go on the fly?
I think this question is important. How fast, how furious? How slow, how stable? No, snail's pace isn't helping, but neither is bleeding edge going to help no matter how point and click the facade gets. If the guts are full of crap then it is no better than the guts being empty.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Our NOC and Monitoring Facility is built on Linux. Up until 2000 we ran RedHat and we switched to Debian based on the recommendation of one of our senior programmers. Two years ago we began switching to Gentoo and today all of our workstations, most laptops, most of our servers, and monitoring cluster nodes are all running Gentoo. We have a lot of machines deployed including a lot of compact flash based remote monitoring nodes which are also running a heavily modified Gentoo install.
Why? Because of the big Sendmail exploit in early of 2003. We happened to be playing with Gentoo at the time on one soon to be mailserver. Running Debian Stable on our other inbound MXs, we waited and waited and waited for patched Sendmail packages. After 3 days we compiled our own binaries and replaced the existing ones until finally a patched Sendmail entered the Debian Stable tree almost TWO WEEKS LATE. The Gentoo box I was playing with had an ebuild for the patched sendmail source within three hours. We started our conversion to Gentoo that day, and we dropped out of Debian completely (I no longer even participate in the newsgroups or Debian Planet) because it takes SO STINKING LONG FOR ANYTHING TO CHANGE.
apt-get --reinstall install vote
as this has already be done in the past (the elections I mean). In fact, you might as well put this as a dependency for every package. So once one upgrades/installs a package, the vote has to be made :P