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Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-09 13:06
by trinidad
Finished install and configuration of Debian 9 64bit from full dvd set last night. Only two glitches. A video piping problem due to old firmware, and a wifi usb adapter issue solved with an old post from this forum. Running Gnome, which has a few subtle differences from Deb 8, but so far not a single unresolvable issue. As expected stable and fast. Thanks to all the great Debian developers. Thanks to this forum for the answer to my wifi problem that I should have known myself. A bit of a duh moment for me. Wasted an hour on other solututions before searching here. I have a half dozen Panda usb wifi adapters at the shop here ranging from five years old to new which have all been basically plug and play for any MS or Linux system that crosses my bench. Worked fine during install but systemd after Deb 9 install is in a different state than after Deb 8 install. Anyway thanks to all the great Debian people. I only ever run stable and the wait for Stretch was well worth it.

TC

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-13 21:56
by Crewp
Thanks to all the dev's and everyone involved in Debian. Stretch is great, and I am really enjoying it.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-14 09:11
by Lysander
Crewp wrote:Thanks to all the dev's and everyone involved in Debian. Stretch is great, and I am really enjoying it.
Agreed, I'm really enjoying it too. The only thing I miss is GNOME 3.16, but that's a minor niggle. Stretch is a definite improvement over Jessie, as much as I like the latter.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-16 08:31
by oswaldkelso
These were my views shared with my friends in irc. I just removed their comments and added a note at the bottom so you'll need to read between the lines.

I thought I try Debian 9... What a pile of crap

It's thrown more errors in half an hour than Dragora in 3 months

Mate uses 590MB to boot to the desktop 10X microde

Without the non free firmware it just complains all the time

I wanted to try Gnome to see if it had improved at all, so I could comment on the "Why I do not use Gnome anymore" thread and at least give a honest review. Not even sure if I'm getting Gnome or Cinnamon

Takes about 60seconds to get an actual desktop

I have 2gb of ram

Cinnamon 751MB to boot to desktop

classic 650MB

It seems clear using any gnome utilities adds a massive amount of bloat. Even using LXDE nm-applet showing 32MB. Openbox is using 16MB as opposed to 5 or so on Dragora why is that?


Anyway to cut it short. Gnome didn't work nor Xfce. Cinnamon worked but was heavy, KDE plasma worked and seemed less heavy, Mate worked as did Gnome classic and lxde. and it's just frozen solid

removed the battery as I couldn't get it to shutdown and on reboot xfce worked and was as light as lxde at 300MB

I tried Debian 9 today. Very bloated, very buggy and slowly but surely turning into RedHat

Note:
Wifi didn't work during the install despite not needing non-free firmware but did after the install.
On later boots Gnome did start! I played with it for a few hours but not long enough to give the interface a fair review. It's just to heavy/slow for me and with it being so dependent on systemd I'm not going to be using it.
I found the whole experience quite sad really.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-16 12:30
by GarryRicketson
Debian 6 "Squeeze" was the best that I have seen. Debian 7 Wheezy, also is
great, as long as you don't upgrade past 7.4

It was refreshing to see a positive post on Debian 9, but sadly it is not the best
that Debian has come up with, and there does seem to be a trend toward it
getting worse instead of better.
It does appear that the users that were so anxious to see Debian get more like their beloved Windows, it seems like they are very happy with the new release. So at least
some users are happy.

In any event, I still appreciate all the work that goes into the development, and
it is "for free", fortunately , at least so far that has not changed.
And I am glad to see some people are happy with it.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-16 19:57
by Lysander
Aren't negative articles and posts part and parcel of many a new distro release experience? People are most likely to comment when a] something doesn't meet their expectations so they think it's terrible and b] when something is a lot better than what preceded it.

I remember when Windows Vista came out people hated it. I really didn't think it was that bad. And then W7 came out and everyone loved it, only because it was a lot better than W7 and more like XP.

Sorry for the Windows references, but can such an ethos be applied to Debian? it seems that many people who are saying bad things about it are coming from other distros. And yes, it may not be the best that the team has come up with, but it's pretty bloody good [do bear in mind I've only been using Debian since Jessie so don't have that much context to work with, but Stretch is solid and I'm hugely enjoying it].

I would be interested so know how it differs to Squeeze and Wheezy other than just systemd.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-16 20:19
by MALsPa
GarryRicketson wrote:In any event, I still appreciate all the work that goes into the development, and
it is "for free", fortunately , at least so far that has not changed.
Yep. Folks may not agree that Stretch is a great release, but Debian's still a great deal.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-16 21:44
by GarryRicketson
by Lysander » I would be interested so know how it differs to Squeeze and Wheezy other than just systemd
In a nut shell, at least to me, Squeeze and Wheezy were much easier to configure, and
trouble shoot, "clean", and simple.
You would really just have to try them, to understand the difference, but also every body
has different needs and preferences, I would bet if you did try Debian 6 squeeze, on a VM, you won't like it.
It does not have all the "new features", that the Debian developers have added, and combined, the Gnome developers, as well. On Debian 6 , the gnome DE was nice, worked
well, now Gnome has become useless to me.
The trend is pretty obvious, the Debian Developers are trying their best, and Gnome as well, are all trying to make Linux/Debian more appealing to the Windows crowd, and they
are succeeding, that is good if you are "mainstream", and want all the newest features, etc,.. have everything the others have.
Actually not just Gnome, all the Desktop Environments, are "improving" in the "mainstream users" opinion, (rather the say "windows users") .
In my opinion, these are not improvements, they are just unneeded baggage,. and of course the more complex the system gets, the more user unfriendly it gets.
Debian 9 might be considered a "truly great distro" by many, it get's into the "car"
analogy,... The newest Cadillac, with all it's fancy gizmo's, is truly a "great car", but not to me, I would prefer a older Volkswagen, and actually do have one,
Image
Photo taken, In Clinton, OK, I drove it all the way from here, in Mexico, and back
several times when I was still working.

Even if they were both offered to me for free, I would take the VW,...well, no, I take that back,... I would accept the Cadillac, then sell it, buy a cheap, but good used VW, and with rest of the $$$ buy bird food.
The VW, has no "fancy gizmos", when something goes wrong it is very easy to repair,
The newest Cadillac, when something goes wrong, you need a very advanced auto technician to try to figure out what went wrong with which gizmo, and only the newest diagnostic equipment can be used.
In any event, Debian is a great distro, the thing of it is, it has become a Cadillac, and
I prefer something much more simple.
(that was supposed to be "in a nut shell", and got to long, sorry)

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-17 18:27
by Lysander
I think this is just part of the new release experience. People will inevitable compare releases and a lot of people will not like the new one. It's the ongoing bane of many a dev's life, I would imagine.

In Wheezy, for instance, I can still dig out a load of complaints with relative ease.

On this forum alone, in one thread, exhibits, A and B.

And C, D and E elsewhere. I'm sure the list goes on.

Some people don't appear to like change - and things do change from release to release. I'm sure similar complaints will come with Buster and Bullseye one day. And maybe I will be one of the complainants.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-17 18:45
by HuangLao
GarryRicketson wrote: Image
Nice ride Garry! We might have what you are looking for over here:https://salixos.org/
or antiX/MX

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-18 07:01
by joseph059
I moved from Ubuntu 17.04 to Debian Stretch. Ubuntu was a bloated distro and a resource hog. When I installed Stretch it was so much lighter and continues to be a real joy to run. Debian is pure linux, no other distro comes close to what Debian is. A great distro!

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-18 13:11
by None1975
In my subjective opinion, Debian 9 is the best Debian releases ever. Maybe my hardware is linux friendly, maybe i am old school guy, who don't like full bloated DE (i use i3wm&old good startx), but on cold boot, Debian 9 uses 130 mb. RAM (on yhe other machine, Debian uses 120 mb. RAM with the same configuration). No bugs, freezes or crap like that. And yes. Guys, please report bugs to Debian bug tracking system https://www.debian.org/Bugs/.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-18 17:30
by Job
GarryRicketson wrote:
by Lysander » I would be interested so know how it differs to Squeeze and Wheezy other than just systemd
In a nut shell, at least to me, Squeeze and Wheezy were much easier to configure, and
trouble shoot, "clean", and simple.
You would really just have to try them, to understand the difference, but also every body
has different needs and preferences, I would bet if you did try Debian 6 squeeze, on a VM, you won't like it.
It does not have all the "new features", that the Debian developers have added, and combined, the Gnome developers, as well. On Debian 6 , the gnome DE was nice, worked
well, now Gnome has become useless to me.
The trend is pretty obvious, the Debian Developers are trying their best, and Gnome as well, are all trying to make Linux/Debian more appealing to the Windows crowd, and they
are succeeding, that is good if you are "mainstream", and want all the newest features, etc,.. have everything the others have.
Actually not just Gnome, all the Desktop Environments, are "improving" in the "mainstream users" opinion, (rather the say "windows users") .
In my opinion, these are not improvements, they are just unneeded baggage,. and of course the more complex the system gets, the more user unfriendly it gets.
Debian 9 might be considered a "truly great distro" by many, it get's into the "car"
analogy,... The newest Cadillac, with all it's fancy gizmo's, is truly a "great car", but not to me, I would prefer a older Volkswagen, and actually do have one,
Image
Photo taken, In Clinton, OK, I drove it all the way from here, in Mexico, and back
several times when I was still working.

Even if they were both offered to me for free, I would take the VW,...well, no, I take that back,... I would accept the Cadillac, then sell it, buy a cheap, but good used VW, and with rest of the $$$ buy bird food.
The VW, has no "fancy gizmos", when something goes wrong it is very easy to repair,
The newest Cadillac, when something goes wrong, you need a very advanced auto technician to try to figure out what went wrong with which gizmo, and only the newest diagnostic equipment can be used.
In any event, Debian is a great distro, the thing of it is, it has become a Cadillac, and
I prefer something much more simple.
(that was supposed to be "in a nut shell", and got to long, sorry)
Best post on the board. Thanks Garry. I have been thinking why don't they give us an option to bare cars and anything else. Even tires have locks these days :roll:

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-18 18:39
by GarryRicketson
HuangLao wrote:
Nice ride Garry! We might have what you are looking for over here:https://salixos.org/
or antiX/MX
Thanks, but I found what I am looking for :
Image

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-19 18:38
by ticojohn
Thought I would throw in my two cents worth. I've been using Stretch AMD64 on my Intel NUC since around April last year. Initially tried Lubuntu but really didn't like it. Tried to install Jessie but there were hardware issues and I wasn't smart enough to fix them, so I went with Stretch. After more than a year of use I have had ZERO problems. To me, that is the sign of a good DISTRO. All the other issues are just fluff! You're using Debian Linux; you can make it what you want and it will be rock solid (as long as you don't do something DUMB like I have in the past)! If you want fluff, then pick another distro (even Windows :cry: ). Stop complaining about all the fluff you're missing with Debian. It is what it is and darned good at that!

And by the way, Garry I like your desktop screen shot, especially the bird. I live in Costa Rica and daily have a yard full of Red Lored Parrots feeding on the Guayaba and other fruits. Noisy but fun to watch.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-21 04:39
by RU55EL
I am very pleasantly surprised at the flawless performance of Stretch on my NUC. Very solid, and performs a little better at HD video playback than Jessie.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-27 21:28
by tynman
Debian is surely not the only one that changes the UUID of swap.
I know I saw this swap-UUID-switch behavior in Jessie every time I did a new installation. Pretty sure in Wheezy too.

I had always assumed this "feature" (assign a new UUID to a new swap partition) was a function of the swapon command, and I further assumed the Debian installer calls the swapon command after formatting the swap partition. I'm not sure how one would verify those assumptions. But if true, then we can't blame Debian for this odd feature - we would need to assign the blame (or accolades) to the author of the swapon command.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-07-27 21:44
by ruffwoof
tynman wrote:
Debian is surely not the only one that changes the UUID of swap.
I know I saw this swap-UUID-switch behavior in Jessie every time I did a new installation. Pretty sure in Wheezy too.

I had always assumed this "feature" (assign a new UUID to a new swap partition) was a function of the swapon command, and I further assumed the Debian installer calls the swapon command after formatting the swap partition. I'm not sure how one would verify those assumptions. But if true, then we can't blame Debian for this odd feature - we would need to assign the blame (or accolades) to the author of the swapon command.
Partition labels, as dasein highlighted, is the way to go IMO. Far easier to swap :) things around.

For instance /etc/fstab format something like

LABEL=seagate_yottabyte /media/yotta ext3 defaults 0 0

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-08-01 20:36
by HubbleT
Debian 9 is great, returned to debian after a while off, installation was easy , everything works 100%.... except with the wifi adapters and such, always had issues with those, in every distro it is a hastle.

Re: Debian 9 is truly a great distro

Posted: 2017-08-09 22:32
by ramblin
I think Debian 9 is truly a great distro ! My goal: to swap out a few outdated W%!#@$ desktops (I will not use swear words here) to live stream a wide variety of radio and tv sites. Barely a novice in Linux I`m total newbie to Debian, I found the installation simple and went thru without a hitch. After troubleshooting some "ancient" hardware issues I was up and running. Troublesome "WIFI" and hard to install "software" was made much easier by the overwhelming support I got on my 2 threads. Just great responce. One reason I chose Debian. Now, fully configured and over 100 hours of streaming I have not had a single issue. Far exceeded my expectations. All the previous headaches with W%!#@$ GONE !! Solid preformance ! LUV it. Thanks to everyone here.