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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.

24 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. systemd vs initd by Pikoro · · Score: 5, Funny

    here we go...

    Guess it's time to change my email address...

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
  2. File manager without file, edit, view.. by Blaskowicz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      A little? GNONE is garbage these days that you avoid with a 20ft pole. If you want to run some other window manager, like blackbox or xfe, then GNOME apps are terribad. There is no window title because they no longer use standard calls to create their windows.

      I basically removed things like Evince and replaced it with much more usable qpdfview, and that is only because of terrible user interface in GNOME.

    2. Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. by vga_init · · Score: 3, Informative

      I have been using Gnome 3 on Fedora for about a couple years now, and I honestly can't understand why people don't like it. In fact, I don't really feel like using other UI's anymore because Gnome 3 is too efficient. Yes, it still has its quirks. The title bar is a little big and gets obnoxious when you maximize some applications, but I'm willing to accept that in order to get everything else it offers.

      The best thing about Gnome now is that it doesn't get in my way. Switching apps/windows is easy. All the useless crap I don't need to see has been taken off the screen. The application launcher is nice, though nothing particularly innovative because anyone who has used Mac OS X or Windows 7 knows what it's doing.

      I'm guessing that people who don't like Gnome 3 never really learned how to use it, like people who say they hate vim. Learning how to use Gnome 3 isn't even that challenging in itself, as the main keyboard shortcuts are very standardized. Launcher and window behavior are exactly what you'd expect them to be. It's fast and sleek, end of story.

      Also it can't be denied that the desktop has undergone appreciable improvements with literally every release. Two years ago the keyboard layout switcher was broken, but now it works beautifully (this feature is important to me because I switch layouts a lot). Fedora 22 has just gone into beta, and if you want to see what Gnome is like now then you can give that a spin. Like I said, I don't use anything else anymore, although when I want to remember what using Windows XP was like, I'll load up KDE or XFCE or LXDE or something. Plus if you're really that attached to Gnome 2, Gnome 3 got a "classic" mode several releases ago which basically duplicates Gnome 2's UI features. You'll get your drop-down app menu back and the little task bar at the bottom.

    3. Re:File manager without file, edit, view.. by jcdr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  3. The systemd suite by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The systemd suite

    Stop. That's the problem, right there.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. Systemd wins? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Choose init during installation? by Pikoro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just did an install in a vm. No. There is no option to choose an init system. systemd is default. If you want to use sysvinit, you have to do it via a pre-install script which basically means, netinstall.

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
  6. Is that proven? by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times

    I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere and I saw the opposite on a eeepc by about half a minute when I put a newer distro with systemd on it. Is there any proof or are the faster boot times just on the wish list?

  7. Re:systemd sux by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Debian 8 so far, so good by ruir · · Score: 4, Informative

    People be aware of some caveats upgrading. Been testing it in the last year, and using it since news year eve in less critical systems in production. systemd has to be pinned to -1 or your servers will get upgraded to it without any interaction from your part. Beware also that Apache configurations change. Some configurations might get broken. libjpeg8 was missing and docker.io still is; backports may solve this. Apache configurations changed a lot. Be also aware that things get installed by default, for instance I had to delete rpcbind from most of my servers. Be also aware open vmtools gets a little confused after the upgrade and needs to be upgraded explicitly.

  9. Different opinions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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"?

  10. systemd by rl117 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:systemd sux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've used it in production for five years (5!) now. Just because Debian is slow to adopt new technology doesn't mean that it's untested. People have used systemd in real-world production systems on other distributions since 2010, and has been around for a couple of years before that.

    Really, that long? Funny, because according to the systemd Wikipedia page the initial release was March 30th, 2010. The Wikipedia page itself wasn't started until August 2010, and Poettering's systemd announcement, where he mentions having an "experimental" init to compete with upstart (which had been around years before systemd) is dated April 30th, 2010.

    That means that, no, it wasn't around a "couple years before" 2010, and wasn't added to any distro repositories until a year later, so your claim to have been using it on "production systems" for "five years now" is just as much bullshit as the claim that systemd existed years before 2010.

    The only way you've been using systemd in production that long is if you're from the future and using systemd-timetraveld.

  12. Re:Too much noise over SystemD by ruir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  13. Re:systemd sux by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  14. Re:Choose init during installation? by Pikoro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ok. Yes. It seems to work. Just append this to the end of the boot string after pressing tab and you'll have a sysvinit system:

    preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core"

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
  15. Systemd vs sysinit boot speed anecodote by Sits · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anecdote 1: I've just timed a Debian Jessie single CPU hard disk based VM install with BTRFS as the filesystem, a GNOME 3 desktop where the user is auto logged in boot and where an autostart script records the time. Here are my rough systemd and sysvinit results (times are from after the kernel core finished to when the GNOME script ran):
    sysvinit (apt-get install sysvinit-core)
    First boot: 20 seconds
    Second boot: 18 seconds
    Third boot: 19 seconds
    systemd (apt-get remove sysvinit-core)
    First boot: 15 seconds
    Second boot: 16 seconds
    Third boot: 15 seconds

    sysvinit averages 19 seconds, systemd averages 15.33 seconds. In this case it does appear that systemd booted the system faster.

    Anecdote 2: Same as above but where the VM's disk is sitting wholly in RAM. Time for sysvinit dropped to 5 seconds and the time for systemd dropped to 4 seconds.

    My personal guess is that the more you are running, the slower the disk the more likely systemd is to benefit you. You don't say how you did your comparison though or what type your "disks" were. If your comparison was between different versions of Linux distro then it could simply be that the previous version did less (which is always the fastest way to boot)...

    Another anecdote: a few years back I saw Slackware systems at a University converted over to systemd. Boot times (which involved waiting for multiple NFS mounts) went from over three minutes to down to less than a minute because more of the waiting was done in parallel.

  16. Re:systemd sux by Eunuchswear · · Score: 4, Informative

    So now you're worried that someone will be able to hack systemd by making it exit a poll(2)?

    systemd pid 1 may have sockets opened and bound but it doesn't read from them. How are you going to hack that?

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  17. Re:systemd sux by SumDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:not enough noise over systemd by raxx7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just upgraded my hobby server from Wheezy to Jessie. sysvinit was upgraded and remained as the init.
    The only bits of systemd in the system are the libsystemd* libraries.

    Maybe you have a service which has some systemd dependency?

  19. not enough noise over systemd by ruir · · Score: 3, Informative

    This beta crap has been imposed over us unnecessarily and politically. Debian also got out of its way and is updating all servers to systemd without our asking, and without any visible dependencies, breaking configurations in the process. This is far more than "noise", what you have is fellow technicians and users, your customers and peers, for christ sake, telling you they are not happy. Many of us that have been months already using Debian with systemd pinned a testimonial that this would not be a required situation. To add insult to injury, everyone that speaks about this tabu is told to suck it up, man up, or that just is making noise. This is the antithesis of Debian and opensource. Debian and linux in spirit is about choice and flexibility, and many of us deflected from Windows and other flavours of Unix just because of that. We have been betrayed and sold. To the ones that say this was a consensual and democratic process. A true free and open process would be to include a choice at installation/upgrade time between the choices. If I do have a choice on the web server, on the DNS server, on the mail server, even on the kernel, on the shell that I deliver for my users, despite having defaults, than why, for christ sake, is systemd being rammed down our throats? Get a grip you and honestly, fuck you all. xxxx

  20. Re:Choose init during installation? by csirac · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, you don't have to do it with preseed. Just sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core. At any time, for the entire lifecycle of your installation. You can switch back with sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv at any time too. Change back and forth at will; I have, and whilst I initially had big problems with it, Debian's packaging now even has filled in the gaps that the systemd project themselves seem uninterested in fixing, such as full crypttab support/compatibility that the old sysv/cryptmount ecosystem had supported.

  21. Re:Choose init during installation? by csirac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty loud critic. Right now I work on embedded ARM where most COM vendors are still - in 2015 - selling brand new kit which can barely run kernel 3.2, let alone 3.7 required for cgroups/systemd - most systemd fanatics try to tell me to compile from mainline kernel sources, which ignores the fact that these things are all one-of-a-kind once-off type systems where I'd have to port the shitty once-off BSP code which barely made it over the wall in the first place (which I have done - and took weeks on my last attempt, due to shitty quirky b0rked interrupts on the MMC interface for that board), not just "yolo, git pull && recompile dawg # to hell with re-certification and customer revalidation" that web hipsters seem to assume is the case.

    But honestly, the technical committee in Debian were the ones we entrusted to make this kind of decision, so it's a meta-lesson in community participation. You can make all the RedHat conspiracies you want but at the end of the day the technical committee volunteers decided it was too much work (read: they didn't have the help like you or I around) to take on spinning a distro with the option to install without systemd.

    So all I'm saying is that the Linux ecosystem is shit, but we have only ourselves to blame.