You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
23 points

I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.

permalink
report
reply
12 points

Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.

The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.

Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.

I’ll stop now. So /rant

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.

This is literally just false.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I’m lazy. Fedora was the only ‘just works’ option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn’t actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.

Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn’t get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘just worked’ in this department.

I will get round to converting them at some point as I don’t plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.

Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.

Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.

Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.

My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.

I don’t know much about KDE at all.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.

Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.

I suffer with systemd

What’s the problem?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.

As far as I know, systemd is only the default.

At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.

I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.

What exactly does “LGLP” mean?

The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.

Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.

Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan…but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License

LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.

Firmware is software.

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.

Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points
*

I don’t doubt that relying on Red Hat’s code makes life easier.

My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.

Curious to see where s6 goes.

I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.

My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you’re a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you’re making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Linux

!linux@lemmy.ml

Create post

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

  • Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
  • No misinformation
  • No NSFW content
  • No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Community stats

  • 7.7K

    Monthly active users

  • 6.5K

    Posts

  • 179K

    Comments