Debian User Forums

I say, Balderdash.

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/locutus/has ... tion-32902

When Debian starts changing its policies, and I see the definitions of main, non-free and contrib being merged into one repository, I can start worrying that Debian is losing its control. Till now, Debian is holding onto its policies.

This almost didn't warrent a comment but I say "HOGWASH!!" Just to be clear on my position.

I don't see anything wrong with following what Ubuntu does as long as it doesn't go against Debian's guidelines and of course is done because it is believed it would improve the OS and not to just to be a copy cat. I also believe the opposite to be true with Ubuntu although technically they copy Debian squeeze/sid each release. For me this is nothing but friendly competition. I don't see why others don't treat it as such. I love Ubuntu but I prefer Debian. Debian is much more annoying in terms of difficulty (learning is my difficulty, but I retain knowledge very well ) although, it is much more reliable. I want an OS that is god-like in stability for my school laptop and would like to avoid risks as much as possible (which is why it has Lenny). For my gaming computer, I use Debian Squeeze (similar to Ubuntu level stability).

EDIT: Another Linux-wide reliable feature is the home partition. I have never seen something so innovative in Windows. If someone knows of a similar thing in Windows, tell me. Not that I have anything important in Windows since it's just used as my gaming alternative if Debian doesn't work, but I'd like to know for the sake of knowledge because you never know when something might come in handy.

I don't think that expert sysadmin knows what the hell he's talking about. Notoriously slow? Has he heard of sid?

Thank you so very much, Ubuntu, for showing us the way.

Where they hell does he think Ubuntu comes from? A snapshot of Debian Sid!! if it wasn't for Debian there would be no Ubuntu.

Stable still has kde3, it is not Debian that is getting rid of kde3 it is upstream. The same goes for kernel update, upstream updates and newer kernels make their way into sid , testing and backports.

The few times I have chatted with people running Ubuntu to compare packages all of the ones we compared were newer on my system that runs Sid.

How many Debian distributions are there?

There are three major distributions: the "stable" distribution, the "testing" distribution, and the "unstable" distribution. The "testing" distribution is sometimes `frozen'. Next to these, there is the "oldstable" distribution (that's just the one from before "stable"), and the "experimental" distribution. Ubuntu has their current release and the LTS.

Debian also supports a ton more hardware than Ubuntu.

There is no one in control of Debian. This is one of the things I like about Debian. Also, his article is full of factual errors and logical fallacies. It makes my head hurt.

Each year dozens of hitchhikers are killed on our nation's highways. If the fellow who wrote that article were an NTSB field agent in charge of investigating these deaths he would notice that they all died with their right thumbs protruding skyward and come to the conclusion that sticking your thumb up is bad for you.

He adds a comment among the responses to the article in which he playfully jokes that he must have really hit Debian users' buttons, and then wonders what he is "doing wrong" -- tongue in cheek. What a clever one he is.

Wow. Just. Wow.

I hope he hasn't procreated. If this guy is using Linux (several distros, no less) then I guess we have our answer about whether or not Linux is ready for the desktop. It is. If he can use it then it must definitely be ready for the (m)asses.

Such an informative article, from a person who didn't trouble himself to do a little research.

The article is really poor, low on fact, big on assertion and like most crap journalism/blogging seems to be more about making a provocative headline to generate hits and click through revenue.

It's quite a few years since I saw the pejorative word 'sheeple' and it always seemed to me to be a fairly good sign that the author has nothing original or interesting to say, but instead unthinkingly regurgitates nonsense, ironically in exactly the way he is attempting to claim is done by those he disagrees with.

Yup, it's nonsense.

I think this is another push by someone who wants the leading edge of whatever silly eye-candy that stirs his fancy at any given moment. That's not about computing, it's toys.

Debian is however, notoriously slow in its development while Ubuntu works on a rapid bi-yearly development cycle. So it is starting to seem to me that the Ubuntu folk have been more responsible for the Debian updates than the Debian developers are.

And people here think I'm a failure of a troll...

julian67 wrote:It's quite a few years since I saw the pejorative word 'sheeple' and it always seemed to me to be a fairly good sign that the author has nothing original or interesting to say, but instead unthinkingly regurgitates nonsense, ironically in exactly the way he is attempting to claim is done by those he disagrees with.

Sheeple.

julian67 wrote:The article is really poor, low on fact, big on assertion and like most crap journalism/blogging seems to be more about making a provocative headline to generate hits and click through revenue.

Agree, a very weak piece.

I couldn't help but laugh when he stated, "Now I am noticing that whatever direction Ubuntu is going, Debian is starting to follow. Ubuntu has dropped KDE3, Debian has dropped KDE3. Ubuntu has a kernel update, Debian has a kernel update." Yeah, and I've noticed that many times when the street is wet, the lawn in front of my home is, too. Apparently this guy doesn't grasp the difference between causation, and correlation due to an outside factor -- in this case, the ongoing development of Linux and the open source desktop in general.

He mentions this thread in one of the comments, he sounds surprised that some devs are working on both debian and ubuntu packages.

The examples he gives that Debian is following Ubuntu is funny, which distro havent gone for kde4 and a newer kernel, are they all following Ubuntu?

s3a wrote: EDIT: Another Linux-wide reliable feature is the home partition. I have never seen something so innovative in Windows. If someone knows of a similar thing in Windows, tell me. Not that I have anything important in Windows since it's just used as my gaming alternative if Debian doesn't work, but I'd like to know for the sake of knowledge because you never know when something might come in handy.

It is possible in WinXP and maybe even Win2K. You would need either a liveCD or it MAY work from a separate account... you need to copy everything from $WINDRIVE\Documents and Settings\$USER to a temp location, then mount your partition in the EMPTY folder $WINDRIVE\Documents and Settings\$USER folder with the windows disk manager, deselecting the drive letter and then selecting the other option for folder mounting. Then you need to copy everything back into the user folder.

Unfortunately if you use a different partition for user you'll encounter applications which are hard coded to have everything in C: instead of using variables so it can get a little messy. I tried it a few years ago and it didn't take too long to realise it just means more work and regular annoyance.

julian67 wrote:Unfortunately if you use a different partition for user you'll encounter applications which are hard coded to have everything in C: instead of using variables so it can get a little messy. I tried it a few years ago and it didn't take too long to realise it just means more work and regular annoyance.

Umm, the way I told him to set it up apps would not even see the different partition. plus it would be under C:\ anyways. Since Win2K ( I think it was 2k anyways) you can mount a volume seamlessly in the file hierarchy just like in UNIX/Linux. On my XP machine that I do all my photoshopping on I have the normal "My Documents" folder and under that I have the "MY Pictures" folder, I just have a 350GB drive mounted under "My Pictures" for exteded storage. Same as having a partition mounted under /home/USER/Pictures on Linux ( well assuming you have home and / on 1 partition.... not 100% certain if it would work properly with mounting a partion in a mounted partition, like a separate /home)

I have also in the past made a C:\data folder and installed many programs to that instead of "Program Files", I haven't come across anything yet that has a hissy-fit since as far as anything is concerned it is writing to a folder on C:\

Oh I see....I had got it into my head that it was about a different partition...

julian67 wrote:http://beranger.org/v3/wordpress/2009/0 ... ubunteros/

LOL. We got em talkin