Debian 8 Jessie Released

linuxscreenshot writes: After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. (Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and a screencast are available.

Comments

File manager without file, edit, view..

[Blaskowicz]

The screenshots aren't looking bad but that Gnome quest for removing menu bars goes a bit far. What if you find yourself with no free space in a file manager window to right-click on. I tell people to use "Edit / Paste" or "File / Create a new folder" in that case.

Re:File manager without file, edit, view..

[jcdr]

I have multiples machines, each with a different Desktop: Gnome 3, Unity, XFCE and MATE.

My biggest problem with Gnome 3 is the fact it's not designed to work well with multiple windows overlapping and spread on a lot of virtual desktops. I usually have more than 100 windows on about 40 virtual desktops. This kind of use is a nightmare with Gnome 3 or Unity because the respective position of the virtual desktops change dynamically so it's impossible to map in the brain. The second problem is the upper left corner switch that place each widows in a random order impossible to memorize, so totally useless for me. The next problem is the animations and effect that make everything slow and distracting. The next problem is the panel extension that are difficult to select because of big catalog of similar entries, and rarely a good quality both in term of usability and in term of look. Finally the menu really hurt on big screen like 4K because it open from the left of the screen but the sub-menus are on the right of the screen. This menu take so much place that it require a lot of mouse translation to do almost anything. Whats totally ridicule is that even by displaying so few items on a 4K screen, this menu is not even able to display the full name of all application because it truncate it to the size of the icon. So no, I really don't like Gnome 3 (and Unity that share a lot of same bad design).

XFCE and MATE are extremely efficient and blazing fast for my use case. There make easy to map in my brain the respective position of a lot of virtual desktops. The panel widget are coherent and easy to select in a small list of entries but with a lot of features of each entries. The menu is the most simplest possible, but display the full name of all the applications, require a minimum of space so it's fast to use with the mouse and is easy to customize. No animation, no effect, just maximal speed. Finally there perfectly scale on a 4K screen without any disadvantage. And i like the windows tab menu with a useful text into each tab describing precisely what's is in each related window.

Put simply, Gnome 3 idea is big graphic and small or no text. What I need is small icon and a lot of text.

The systemd suite

[Hognoxious]

The systemd suite

Stop. That's the problem, right there.

Systemd wins?

[Anonymous Coward]

If systemd is in Debian, we might have consider that it won, even though there was a ton of backlash. Time to go read the docs on that animal, or I'll be plain old granpa neckbeard a lot sooner.

Re:systemd sux

[dbIII]

most importantly, things are improving.

They certainly have to continue to improve before systemd becomes a more worthwhile option than the things it is replacing.
The only problem systemd solves is to replace things so old that they are maintained by people that have been coding for longer than Lennart Poettering.

Different opinions

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see here. First I heard "systemd" was coming. I had no idea what it was. Then, running Mint 17.1, I found out what it was, switched to Ubuntu 15.04 to find out. I had heard horror stories how bad it was but I thought the people complaining must be some "old lazy system admins" how learned something new 20 years ago.

Ok, so here I am in Ubuntu 15.04. I see the shutdown/reboot process is fast. Why? Because the shutdown part of the reboot is fast, not the actual startup (compared to Ubuntu 14.10). I find out probable reason why it is that way. Normally processes are first sent the SIGTERM signal to make them quit in a controlled way. But that needs some waiting.

Now I see the new behavior is to just reboot/shutdown without waiting. Any unfinished editing is lost, connections are torn down forcefully. Why? Because this is the way it should be: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-October/024452.html

Then I read more about this attitude from Wikipedia: "For instance, Poettering has advocated speeding up Linux development at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX and other Unix-like operating systems such as the BSDs.[12][13]".

I'm not anymore so sure about this. Personally, I will switch back to Mint until the regressions are fixed. What is the current progress and why do we have this type of "cowboy coding" process in place for standards and/or "de facto" functionality/dependencies? Why are there so many in Slashdot creating comments such as "Do you really think that systemd will kill your wife and eat your dog"?

systemd

[rl117]

After using and developing Debian for 18 years, this is the first release I have no plans to use, all thanks to the gnome and systemd idiocy. It hasn't been a nice experience, seeing a system build up with loving care by so many people over so long being willfully trashed by a small handful of people. I for one have no interest in being RedHat's bitch; if I wanted to be, I'd be a suffering Fedora or CentOS user. Debian has lost its independence and freedom.

I've been using FreeBSD for nearly 18 months now, and rarely boot up Debian on my systems or VMs. Going back 5 years, I'd never have imagined this is the way things would play out. Tragic.

Re:Too much noise over SystemD

[ruir]

What compiling? I have a farm of virtualized Debian 8 servers and they have been chugging happily in the last few months with systemd pinned to -1. And who are you to tell others to shut up and suck it up?

Re:systemd sux

[Hognoxious]

GP is reading from his own CV. He also has 3 years experience in doing the needful with Java 9.

Re:systemd sux

[SumDog]

Really? It's the apocalypse?

Look, I don't like systemd from a design perspective. But it does do one or two things really well: It's standardized init scripts between each distribution and it has full process control. It can track a process no matter how many children it makes.

It does way too much other stuff too. The binary logs are dumb. It's not small and modular. Yada yada.

The biggest problem which needed to be solved was full process management and none of the other projects were really getting anywhere.

It sucks. It shows that Redhat controls way to much. Other projects weren't able to get in. Yea I know. But it's not causing systems to go unstable and crash all the time. Put some perspective into it.