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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.)
No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)
A blog like any other.
Is it something easier to use I might understand and be able to install myself?
My little site.
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.
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
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.
In North Korea, only dead people cast votes via Diebold.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
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.
Can an election get slashdotted? Is that the intention of posting the story on /. ?
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
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.
what the fuck kind of troll is this? I've never even used Debian, but how can you consider a distro that runs you as root to be good? I also very much doubt it takes 2 days to install debian. Fuck, it doesn't even take that long to install Gentoo. What are you freaking smoking dude?
Le français vous intéresse?
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.
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
I use Gentoo and love it, but I must point out that what you're talking about is not entirely true. Obviously Gentoo is great for those who love source-based installs, but that's not everyone. Some people just want the ease of installing an app in 10 seconds.
Le français vous intéresse?
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...
This happened to me. I like Debians ideology but apt-get bit me too many times and I hated using software that was very old. Gentoo is working fine for me now
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
Linspire is not free(as in beer) and if the company goes bankrupt, there goes your OS. I prefer Ubuntu.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
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.
>2 GB of data not enough? What is so enticing on those 3 cd's that you dismiss Mandrake as an option for a newbie? I thought that Mandrake was supposed to be one of the most newbie friendly distros.
Unlesss she's a highly unusual user, your friend's wife is going to use about 4 applications. If she must have all the applications under the sun, configure and show her how to use the package manager to download anything her heart desires.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
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.
Scratch Fedora unless you're running the greatest and latest hardware. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of time agonizing over what should be a straightforward installation.
5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope...
pkgtool does an acceptable job with Slack. I'm not too sure where you were headed with this one...
"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
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.
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 hereTry to upgrade her box from Windows 95 first. Any of Win2k and later OS doesn't crash without a good reason (such as h/w failure.)
Security-wise there may be reasons to give her a Linux box, but in general if you want minimum headache then Windows will work for her just fine. Just make a c: partition image on a spare, unmounted partition and restore it automatically every week :-) Everything else she needs must be on a USB Flash disk.
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...
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.
There's always CentOS. The Open Source version of RHEL stripped of all the Red Hat branding.
1. I 'think' the parent post was implying the steps involved with totally installing an OS from scratch till the point its fully working. If debian was missing some key drivers that takes a lot of web sites to solve, it could easily drag on for quite some time to solve all the issues. Thats from someone that knows what they're doing. 'users' are just SOL.
2. Requirements gathering 101
What do you want an OS to do?
If you want a very secure OS, you install an SELINUX Linux distro with strict.
If you want a secure OS, you can learn to not use root unless you have to.
If you want a system thats simpler than that, you use a distro that has root-user.
It may not be a 'good' security solution, nobody is asserting that, but you can't deny that a system that doesn't have security has less holes to jump through.
Bye!
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.
my money's on deb, but ian is still within striking distance, according to the latest poll.
Linux is run by a benign dictator. This model often works quite well, even for countries.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
i completely agree with you debian has by far the best package management of any distro! it've tried suse mandrake and fedora core 3 none of them impress me as much as debian. I'M A LINUX NOOB using DEBIAN! Because it has so many packages, i don't have to compile squat.
only 199 of 960 active developers had voted -- well down on the 315 who had cast ballots at the same stage last year.
I rather like CentOS4 (and I suppose RHEL4 by proxy). I didn't care much for 3.x, but then Red Hat was in the process of reinventing a lot of things for 4.0. It's kind of slow, and I hope that RH was serious when they spoke of paying attention to the users' needs more in the future. I also hope they can do something to speed things up a bit, though I'm willing to put up with stuff being a *little* slower in exchange for the length of promised support.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
2. Mandrake: (..) 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.
/that/.
Yeah, that's right, you're paying for their job. You can get the sources. Do you want everything free as in beer? F/OSS was never
Although I don't use Mandrake, last month I looked at it, and they were charging something like $22/year (or was it $122 ?) so you could just sit back on your chair and hit the update button. Is that tooooo much?
This mentality that Free Software is beer sucks. You can always patch your systems by hand, you know...If you want somebody to manage all those changes for you, you pay. It's a reasonable model, it keeps people working and the software flowing.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
only developers of debian can vote
- Ubuntu is not susceptible to viruses and spyware.
- For $0 he gets a complete operating system and set of applications, saving him around $1000.
- It works.
- I have little inclination to provide support for MS based systems, so by running Ubuntu he gets me interested.
He bravely started off with the first release (warty) of Ubuntu. There were a few minor glitches (mainly that the graphical modem configuration didn't work, so I had to do it for him from the a bash prompt, and the web browser didn't have java and flash installed by default) but the whole process went remarkably smoothly. My expectation is that the imminent second release (hoary) will be polished enough that my father could do an installation by himself.In short, ditch the windows. For a typical home user Ubuntu can do everything windows can only more reliably, better and cheaper. (No doubt others will offer conflicting opinions.)
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?
And I get modded down as troll for pointing it out. Nice moderating. Again.
...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.
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.
They are all busy emerging....
Cogent points.
But dude, try Gentoo.
Ports are yet another great thing to come out of BSD and into the Linux 'mainstream'. Plus who didn't get curise about Linux becuase of the tewaking aspect? (Answer: People buying PCs to install pirated copies of Windows on)
Otherwise, a fair assesment.
.\.\att Clare
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.
While my knowledge of Open Source isn't as good as I would like it to be (being a M$ developer myself ... unfortunately)
it seems from a lot of the posts that Debian is blotted and slow to release.
In answer to the number of packages Debian maintains ... it could be a relatively small number of the extremely dedicated. It also seems to confirm the bloat factor.
I recently installed a debian using a netinst disc. Took me couple of hours to grab everything i needed online. Granted I know a little more than joe sixpack but that's the point. I don't think joe sixpack made up a large majority of the debian user base so it couldn't really have been linspire that "had them on the ropes". If debian users did depart it would probably be to some other more techy based distro :).
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.
I've never got one to install...
I'd leave it overnight, come back in the morning and find it'd decided to use the wrong version of something and failed with some obscure error.. fdisk, start again. Gave up after a week.
It definately needs an installer... just getting the USE line right is half an hour with vi looking through the documentation, and I still never worked out a combination I was happy with.
Remember, Michael Moore is filming the elections.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?
However the one thing Debian and the other binary distros really should learn from Gentoo is how to produce good documentation without creating too much documentation. There is exactly one guide for every major issue with Gentoo and none of them is excessive in length.
Linux is not Windows
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.
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).
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
Actually, I've found Fedora to be better supported than previous versions of RedHat. Mostly because they have much better package management, and there are people who actively maintain package repositories of software that Fedora didn't include on the CD.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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.
I do use debian. I love it for my home server. Its on an old box and I don't want it spending all week building everything with gentoo. But it is running Debian Sarge which I feel is the best combination of stability and newness.. Throw a few backports in and you get most if not all the software you need for a server with no fuss...
If i had a faster server I would for sure be heading down the gentoo route...
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
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.
Yeah, it's great until you have to install software not on the installation CDs. Dependency hell...
Visit www.doc2pdf.net for a free, no need to register,
Or grant the governer the authority to prevent the removal of the power tube from a Debian PC after it has suffered a kernel panic.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yeah, its almost as if moderation is done by more than one person with more than one opinion.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'm sorry to say it, but if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be screwing around unless you're willing to accept some breakage now and then. Instead of jumping from distro to distro at any sign of trouble, why not try to figure out what's wrong and attempting to fix it. If you're not willing to do that, I don't understand why you were trying out unstable packages.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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).
...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.
"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."
I loved all those things about Gentoo, however I eventually abandoned it due to its unmatched ability to break itself without my help.
I tried it twice, each time for about 3 months. I had breakage on most of my updates. Nobody's perfect, but there were problems like a KDE update requiring a masked version of famd. Since that would have been caught if anyone had tried it on a "stable" system (as building it is sufficient to reveal the problem), I can only conclude they didn't do any regression testing at all. That's just not good enough.
I almost always found the solution on the forums, however cruising the forums looking for patches is an enormous pain in the butt and they can take days to appear. I'd rather use a distro that's a bit out of date and then manually install the two things I actually want the latest version of.
Debian is too stable and it's really irritating how out of date it is, but Gentoo is too unstable to be useful on production machines. Being up to date is only a benefit when the damn thing works.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
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
"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."
I'm not taking a side in this argument; just pointing out an inconsistancy here.
If you install Linux, you get the operating system for free. You also get all the basic stuff (Gimp, OpenOffice, Firefox) for free.
But if you install Windows, you pay $100-$200 for the operating system, but you can also download the exact same extras (Gimp, OpenOffice, Firefox) for free, bringing the total cost to $100-$200, not $1000.
You don't have to run MS Office and Photoshop if you run Windows.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
It's way too easy to accidentally screw the system up
Heh, you state that it's an accident, but what did YOU do to screw the system up? Like me you probably did nothing, it's just that Gentoo managed to fuck shit up itself. Basically it's a Linux problem. It's pretty rare to see an install that's screwed up by default. But it's the updates that kill. With Gentoo you end up with constant fustration of little small things that break here and there on a regular basis - usually easily fixed, but annoying none the less. Other distros that have a fixed release schedule often tend to have MAJOR problems during an update due to the nature of them upgrading everything at the same time. It's something Linux will hopefully iron out as it matures.
I think the Gentoo handbook could use a more intuitive format and documentation, but maybe that's just me. I went for months just doing emerge -u world, but eventually someone pointed out that you should use the deep option every now and then as well (emerge -vup --deep world). Not surprising I had a lot of dependancies that were way out of date. Then stuff like revdep-rebuild, and emerge --depclean don't seem to be well explained. Well now that I found out about dispatch-conf at least I won't be faced with config over-write explosions
Hmmm... I think you've just further demonstrated my point. Mepis and Knoppix (know nothing of Ubuntu) are based on Debian. Don't think those smaller distros would be able to survive without the Debian team.
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)
on the server side, some of us went to real rock solidness via OpenBSD and FreeBSD 4.x too. As long as we're offtopic, must say you made me laugh, a LOT of my developer friends (some of whom have been with Linux and *BSD for over ten years) are buying mini-macs and mac laptops and using them for business and "mac lifestyle" type stuff such as ipod and i-whatever.
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)
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
- Surfing the internet for cricket scores
- Checking and printing email
- The occasional word processing
Now I've got it all nicely set up for him. The machine boots up and starts the ADSL connections. He gets his firefox complete with the bookmark toolbar customised to all his favourite websites AND open office to do his occasional work. Just 2 years ago he said he could never use a computer. And today at 65 he's running Mandrake Linux on an old 1ghz Athlon machine.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.
I smell a troll.
or a gentoo fan boy.
you decide which is worse.
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
Like hell. Ever heard of apt4rpm? Apparently you don't run SUSE. Have no problems installing packages.
This guy is way out there
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
It is dependency management that it leaves to the user.
You use the former phrase four times, yet do not seem to understand the distinct difference between the two.
They are NOT the same thing, and Volkerding deliberately omits the latter. There are several 3rd party tools which provide this in slack(swaret, slapt-get, pkgtool, etc.), but as of yet none have proven to be 100% reliable.
I run slack on most everything. Simply do a fairly complete original install, and pay attention to dependencies when installing anything not included. Any site you grab source from lists them. Any package on linuxpackages.net lists them. Personally, I have no issues with this whatsoever. I can probably download and install any random package off linuxpackages along with any dependencies taht are missing from the base slack install(which is rare) quicker than you can do the same with apt. Not that apt isn't a good system. It is. But Slack's is not as cumbersome as you think.
once you go slack, you never go back
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
slackware was not designed aroung a dependency resolving package manager like debian. slapt-get is a neat hack, but its still a hack.
In other words, when admining my slackware servers, i use wget and installpkg/upgradepkg.once you go slack, you never go back
Having to create a 64-bit AMD version and versions for other architectures must be slowing things down. They've dropped some platforms already.
now there are more servers running Fedora Core or FreeBSD... Sorry, but I had to tell you that... Debian is dying!
The maturity of Linux desktops seems to be reaching a tipping point this year. At the same time people are becoming increasingly unhappy with the amount of work needed to keep their windows boxes running.
I built a system for my sister two years ago. I offered to put RH 9 on it but she insisted on using windows. After a couple of years in share house environments, attached to a DSL line the system was stuffed.
My sister actually asked me to put linux on it this time. I installed Ubuntu, which I have previously decided not to use on my servers. But for her environment it is an excellent fit because:
http://michaelsmith.id.au
.. 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.
Gentoo could work for that. What we need is a proper repository for gentoo packages. With strict packaging rules, like debian. Ideally there would be some way for people to provide packages with all the different possible USE combinations, so you wouldn't lose flexibility by using binary packages. It would take up a helluva lot of space, but I think it's doable. Are there any efforts to make one?
I am trolling
The Debian folks are too slow and too focused on political issues.
Woody was released nearly three years ago, and wasn't anything near cutting edge when it was released.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'll second support for Ubuntu. My GF's parents had an OLD PC running 95. Her own old PC was not great either, but I uppped the RAM to 384, put a 80 GB hard drive, and installed Warty. Since last Thanksgiving (~ end of November 2004 for the non-US readers), I've only had two real questions - one was to help get sound working, and the other was concerning USB and a digital camera.
And to make things easier for the transition, I pared down the GNOME interface and menus to exactly what they needed. OO for any MS docs, and AbiWord + Gnumeric for their own personal stuff (as those we much faster on that older machine than OO). They have even been able to download stuff from their digital camera and muck around with that a little without too much trouble. They have issues with some IE-centric websites, but for the most part (till the web really becomes standard - yeah right !!), it has been a surprisingly smooth and trouble-free transition on both ends - mine and theirs. Chalk up another win for OSS !!
I don't think my post is off-topic as it addresses the apathy that has grown in the Linux community. Why are Linux users moving to Mac OS X? Is the community too fragmented?
I don't think it is entirely a bad thing as I think there is a lot we can learn from Apple. I think we have already seen many people rethinking Linux on the Desktop in light of having experienced Mac OS X.
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)
I've used some of them, and the Open Source applications are definitely better quality. Sometimes the stuff that comes with the camera has specific features that would be very nice to have, but overall they're actually not very good compared to similar Open Source applications.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
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
You hit the glibc bug.
My box can not compile at all anymore and it was the result of an emerge -system on my box.
http://saveie6.com/
"Basically it's a Linux problem."
Sorry the kernel broke your package management?
Sorry it is a packaging issue - getting software to play nicely is what distros are all about.
The only thing to mess up recently in my Debian testing install was AMSN, and GAIM uses the same config file so that didn't really hurt. Otherwise I've just been acquiring the bug fixes as Sarge is bought into release quality, although the only one I noticed in the last few weeks was the fix to the GNOME backdrop chooser.