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Debian Jessie is pretty slick

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vbrummond
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Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#1 Post by vbrummond »

I decided to test out Debian 8 "Jessie" and found that I quite like this release. It seems like (for me anyway) it launched with a whimper and not much bang. No matter what the open source ecosystem is like, the launch of a full Debian release should always be noticed. :)

I've steered clear of the whole fork and systemd drama that has been particularly wild in the Debian community. I actually have been using Fedora (and FreeBSD) in the time since my exodus from here. There is a lot to like in most distributions these days I had a hard time finding one I disliked. Finding the one I want to support the most is the biggest challenge.

I want to congratulate the Debian team for this release. I am sorry to say I wasn't much of a part of it. Though I never was a Debian developer, I really enjoyed giving tech support here. This was my home away from home when I teethed off of Ubuntu and learned how to administer a real system. I appriciate all Debian has done and I rather wish I never left it to begin with. I remember the good old days when I turned a spare P4 workstation into a home server with Debian and all of the cool networking tricks I learned from that.

I just did a nice full real installation of Debian so I thought I would drop by to say hello. I am not sure how my coming back would be recieved here, but its a trivial thing. I am impressed so far that the changes aren't advertising friendly "new features!" but real incremental improvements. I have been fairly frustrated with all of the crazy experimental kernel features added to other primary distributions such as blk-mq on openSUSE and the full timer tick hz on Fedora. Of the latter I couldn't even fathom why one would want that enabled on a general purpose system.

Either way, I plan on giving this a good test and jotting down some observations. How was everyone else's experience/upgrades? Right now my only observation is the nice 6 second boot time on a minimal system. I can't get it below 30 on Fedora. ;)
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Roel63
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#2 Post by Roel63 »

Exactly my experiences since my Jessie upgrade a few months ago.

Now searching for a way to upgrade my sheevaplug :)

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dasein
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#3 Post by dasein »

vbrummond wrote:I am not sure how my coming back would be recieved...
I'd bet that there are several folks here who would vote for a grouphug. :D

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#4 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

vbrummond wrote:How was everyone else's experience/upgrades?
IMO Jessie is nothing short of pure distilled awesomeness.

It's the finest general-purpose operating system available right now.
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vbrummond
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#5 Post by vbrummond »

dasein wrote:I'd bet that there are several folks here who would vote for a grouphug. :D
It's good to talk to you again. :) I want to try to stick around.
Head_on_a_Stick wrote:IMO Jessie is nothing short of pure distilled awesomeness.

It's the finest general-purpose operating system available right now.
I think it might be so. The installation is flexible and lightweight unlike Anaconda or YaST. It takes forever to install Fedora in a virtual machine on my old hardware.
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#6 Post by Hallvor »

Good to have you back. :)
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vbrummond
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#7 Post by vbrummond »

Hallvor wrote:Good to have you back. :)
Thank you. :) Good to be back.
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sjukfan
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#8 Post by sjukfan »

vbrummond wrote:How was everyone else's experience/upgrades?
Been running Jessie fine on my main computer for quite a while. But I did an upgrade on my old NSLU2 the other day. Apt has grown a bit so there's a lot of swapping going on there but except for that it worked fine.
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dotlj
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#9 Post by dotlj »

I agree. Jessie is running nicely on this machine and has been since November last year.
It boots quite fast, faster than Wheezy and much faster than other systems that I've seen.
Installation and setup was very easy as usual.
No problems so far, none expected.

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thanatos_incarnate
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#10 Post by thanatos_incarnate »

dotlj wrote:I agree. Jessie is running nicely on this machine and has been since November last year.
It boots quite fast, faster than Wheezy and much faster than other systems that I've seen.
Installation and setup was very easy as usual.
No problems so far, none expected.
+1 Great job as always

Still on Fedora though, since my machine needs a newer kernel and Xorg stack to work decently
(it runs on Jessie, but not optimally.) I will check back in when the updates start rolling in Sid.

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kc1di
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#11 Post by kc1di »

Just install jessie and find it so far a great choice for my desktop. Great Job Team :)
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#12 Post by kedaha »

@vbrummond:
Nice to see you back. :)
I've installed "jessie" on two desktop computers so far and will eventually install it on a number of other machines too although I'll wait some time before using it on my server. I installed the mate desktop and I feel much more at home with it than the new-fangled Gnome3. On one computer I installed encrypted lvm and also the plymouth default theme called "lines" and was surprised & pleased to see this pretty "lines" theme appear with a space to enter the password to unencrypt the disk.
I agree it seems pretty slick to me too, but I have my doubts about being able to use OSS4 instead of alsa and pulseaudio.
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JLloyd13
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#13 Post by JLloyd13 »

I've had it on my desktop for a while, and now I'm upgrading my Chromebook :) definitely a solid upgrade, and I like how it was a nice quiet release, not like every new Ubuntu version crashing all the news feeds with separate announcements for every single DE and everyone losing their minds over a half-baked semi-upgrade of what just happened 6 months ago. As usual Debian is just dependable :) systemd is of course the big news, but so far haven't had a problem (lets hope systemd stays where it is from this point out)
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#14 Post by Bulkley »

I'm not as impressed with Jessie as some of you are. I tried it several months ago and decided that it wasn't ready for prime time. I upgraded to Jessie again yesterday and I don't see much, if any, improvement. Here's the deal. I am using a ten year old desktop with a primitive Athlon processor. Consequently, I do not use a full desktop or the toys that go with them. I don't even us a DM and choose to log in with sx (short for startx). Openbox works well on Jessie but some of my favourite programs don't. Miro has been abandoned by Jessie. Is that because it didn't adapt to a systemd environment? Totem has taken a step backwards and left out many standard controls; or maybe I'm missing part of it. The Grub menu is so small I can't read it with my old eyes and I'm have to edit it. Etc.

Is it possible that Jessie is so steered to Gnome 3 that anything else takes a back seat?

Iceweasel is better.

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JLloyd13
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#15 Post by JLloyd13 »

Finished upgrading my Chromebook and everything went well! A very welcome update from Xfce 4.8 to 4.10, better iceweasel, etc. Everything worked perfectly except I had to renable tap to click. It starts and shuts done quicker too, maybe that's systemd but I didn't notice that effect on my desktop.
Bulkley wrote:I'm not as impressed with Jessie as some of you are. I tried it several months ago and decided that it wasn't ready for prime time. I upgraded to Jessie again yesterday and I don't see much, if any, improvement. Here's the deal. I am using a ten year old desktop with a primitive Athlon processor. Consequently, I do not use a full desktop or the toys that go with them. I don't even us a DM and choose to log in with sx (short for startx). Openbox works well on Jessie but some of my favourite programs don't. Miro has been abandoned by Jessie. Is that because it didn't adapt to a systemd environment? Totem has taken a step backwards and left out many standard controls; or maybe I'm missing part of it. The Grub menu is so small I can't read it with my old eyes and I'm have to edit it. Etc.

Is it possible that Jessie is so steered to Gnome 3 that anything else takes a back seat?

Iceweasel is better.
As part of the Gnome desktop environment, I wouldn't be surprised if totem did infact remove options, Gnome seems to like doing that now. I would give either mplayer and it's many skins, or my favorite, VLC a shot.
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fireExit
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#16 Post by fireExit »

Bulkley wrote:Miro has been abandoned by Jessie.

Bug #754232

Jagcoxa
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#17 Post by Jagcoxa »

Hi

i do not want to be a showstopper :?

I am migrated from fedora 21 to debian 8 yesterday, because fedora started to behave instable. Do not know why, to be honnest. Dell laptop is 2 years old, and the ssd card is 2 month's old.

beside that.....
installation went fine, and took me roughly 30 minutes or so .

There are some things i would like to adress.

Gnome screensaver
Where is the Gnome screensaver after a default installation?

i did not find it and did:
apt-get install xscreensaver xscreensaver-data xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl-extra

after that i did:
Now start the xscreensaver configuration tool - from a terminal:

xscreensaver-demo

0 - 1 Debian :?:

Mount Network devices
Executing: mount -t cifs //192.168.1.14/Music /home/debian/QMusic -o guest,noperm
in order to mount the dir Music from the NAS results in nothing but an error

had to install:
apt-get install cifs-utils

0 - 2 Debian :?:

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is by default not enabled / installed, so i had to do
apt-get install openvpn

This did not work, because of a misisng package
therefore i had to install network-manager-openvpn-gnome
and do a : service networking restart

0 - 3 Debian :?:

Gnome subtitles
After the installation of gnome-subtitles, it was not able to load any video file like mkv/mp4
i had to add a debian-multimedia mirror to etc/apt/sources.list
http://deb-multimedia.org/debian-m

After that:
wget http://www.deb-multimedia.org/pool/main ... .2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i deb-multimedia-keyring_2014.2_all.deb
apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

0 - 4 Debian :?:

From my point of view, the above issues has to be able by default, AFTER a clean installation.
New users / inexperient users want a complete package

Beside that, debian looks good

And guys, this is no offense to debian, only my experience

TeknoBug
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#18 Post by TeknoBug »

If you ask me, Debian 8 has been one of the best since Debian 2.2.
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#19 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Jagcoxa wrote:New users / inexperient users want a complete package
New/inexperienced users should understand that Debian places user control above convenience.

If you don't like having to configure your system manually to your own tastes, use Ubuntu or Mint instead.
deadbang

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GarryRicketson
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Re: Debian Jessie is pretty slick

#20 Post by GarryRicketson »

I think so too
YES indeed, I like it, after trying it in a VM, I decided to resize a partition and create a new one, on the real HD, and install for real,
New/inexperienced users should understand that Debian places user control above convenience.
Well not all, of us , this is what I like about it, the installation was VERY "user friendly" and
now that have the basic OS, I can add on to it and configure it exactly the way I want it to be.
I think the debian developers have done a wonderfull job.
It seems quite "complete" to me, everything I need to get started, the rest I can do just the way I want, not some "pre-configured ,complete package" full of junk that I won't even use and don't need.
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