Debian 9 is truly a great distro

[bushpilot]

Thank you all who made Debian 9 possible. It has been stellar in performance since install. I could not be happier with this distro. Thanks again to you all.

Bill

[GarryRicketson]

Thank you for saying this, it is refreshing to hear from some one that
has Debian 9 running and no complaints. Of course most people that
are not having any problems with it do not usually post, we all ways
just see the ones that are having problems.
Glad to see someone is happy with the new release.

[MALsPa]

Three Stretch installations here, all is well.

[rivenathos]

Garry has a point in that many posts here are about problems and complaints. This forum is an excellent resource for those who need assistance, and really want to learn how to do things the Debian way. Perhaps the majority of us who have no issues whatsoever may wish to post more and share our positive experiences.

Granted, there are always going to be small differences between releases, but having depended on Debian since Etch, I honestly have not experienced any show stoppers. Running Stable on my main hardware with the expectation of solid performance and reliability, I have never been disappointed.

[Lysander]

I switched from Jessie to Stretch the day the latter was released. The net install was pretty much flawless for me [the second time I did it anyway] and everything from then on has been, to be fair, great. Things do work better in Stretch than Jessie - the biggest point for me being that Pulse Audio selects the right sound card on reboot, when it didn't do this in Jessie and it took me two weeks to work out how to solve it.

I have the system running about, I would say, 95% of how I want it to. It's an excellent distribution.

I would also like to publicly thank dasein for the help he's given me on these forums. I feel like I'm a music student learning from some virtuoso. I really appreciate the 'no nonsense' approach of the forums, and I think it's important that such a methodology is upheld because it encourages the individual to do the learning himself: this can cede long-term results which benefit the community and the OS. Debian sets the bar high, as do these forums, and I think that's important for those serious about the distro.

[kedaha]

I've never really thought of Debian as a mere distro but rather as a mega-distribution which other spin-offs are based on. but I've upgraded to stretch without issues from jessie on several computers and as ever am very pleased with it. I'm not planning to upgrade my server though because it'll run very nicely on jessie for a considerable time to come.

[NFT5]

A truly great distro. Is it?

USB installation failed because the installer thought the USB was a CD and couldn't load drivers for it. Believe this is now fixed, but should have been done before release.

Installed from CD (netinstall + non-free) which was relatively painless, but.....

Failed to set up LAN, despite knowing the workgroup name.

Made a complete botch of GRUB on a relatively simple system with Debian 8 and MX-16 already installed.

Only installed the basics of MATE desktop.

Still no fix for the IO Page Fault error, which has to be corrected manually. I'm used to this, but it is a known problem and has been for a long time.

Would have changed the UUID of Swap, had I not prevented it. Another fail that would have meant more manual setting up and newbies would be wondering about ridiculous load times.

Even Ubuntu 16.04 did a better job of installing and configuring and, like MX-16, is far better aimed at the desktop user, provided you can get past their insistence on sudo for everything which is nearly as bad as MX-16's need to become root to even scratch your nose.

Software package is basic in the extreme. No email client, no bit torrent client, few utilities. OK, I get that everything is available in the repos and not everyone has the same preferences but a desktop environment is, these days, more than Libre Office (which is very pretty but doesn't actually do anything more than the older version did). IIRC there were a couple of broken theme packages and just one new wallpaper. Wow.

A few other gripes and groans as I wandered through it, very little to commend it as any sort of major step forward.

I shut it down, went back to Jessie and changed the GRUB order to put 9 at the bottom of the list. Haven't been back and don't know if I could be bothered at this point. Jessie is stable and works just fine on my production machines and server while MX-16 shapes up as the forerunner to MX-17 which will likely be what Stretch should have been.

I concede that everything (well, almost) is fixable and there are some significant improvements 'under the hood' but the question in my mind is whether it's that much better then Jessie or, for that matter, Wheezy?

[Lysander]

It's perfectly understandable that you have had issues with Stretch but it would be nice if we kept this thread positive. This isn't really the place for a diatribe on the problems with Debian 9 and why you don't like it, neither is it the right place to encourage a back-and-forth debate on its demerits.

[None1975]

A truly great distro. Is it?
Would have changed the UUID of Swap, had I not prevented it. Another fail that would have meant more manual setting up and newbies would be wondering about ridiculous load times.

I made a clean install (net install) of Debian 9 Stretch about two months ago. never had problems with uuid swap. My startup time

Code: Select all

systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.511s (kernel) + 10.448s (userspace) = 13.960s

System on hdd, not ssd.
Maybe you do something very wrong, or should stay in Ubuntu land....

[thunderogg]

Running Debian Stretch and Gnome 3.22 on two machines. No problem to install, no problem to configure, no problem to maintain, and no problem to run!
Absolutely rock solid! In my opinion, there is no better system than Debian.

[NFT5]

It's perfectly understandable that you have had issues with Stretch but it would be nice if we kept this thread positive. This isn't really the place for a diatribe on the problems with Debian 9 and why you don't like it, neither is it the right place to encourage a back-and-forth debate on its demerits.

Why? I was under the impression that this was a forum where open discussion was not discouraged and that aspects of this distribution that we use could be talked about in a sensible way. What better place to bring a point of balance than a thread which, if allowed to continue in such a way as you seem to propose would have us seen as no more than ostriches, burying our heads in the sand to avoid seeing or hearing facts that we don't want to acknowledge.

Would it not seem equally ridiculous if we were to have a separate thread where the shortcomings of Stretch were allowed, but any positive comments not?

Maybe you do something very wrong, or should stay in Ubuntu land....

Fact: If you have a machine with an existing swap partition and take the default Debian (or most other Linux distros) installation, it will format that partition and a new UUID will be allocated. When this happens and you start one of the other distros it will go looking for the old swap UUID and continue to look for it for some 90 seconds, after which it will give up. The solution is to correct the UUID in /etc/fstab, following which the problem will not recur.

You will note that in my previous post I mentioned that I have two other distros (Debian 8 and MX-16) installed. I did nothing wrong, in fact I did right by preventing the Debian 9 installation from formatting the swap partition. That way I only had to make a change to one fstab file, rather than two. From time to time I do have Ubuntu installed on this machine and I install it permanently on one other, of the 15 or so that I administer, because it suits the needs and abilities of that user better than Debian, which is installed as the primary OS on all the others. To do otherwise would have me in the same category as those large, flightless birds that I referred to above. Fortunately, here in Australia, we have emus instead of ostriches and while just as stupid in most respects, the emu has no propensity for ignoring the obvious.

In a nutshell I'm not bagging Debian 9, but I do think that it could have been done better and was released perhaps a little prematurely. That's the end of my comment on the matter, in this thread at least. If Debian's 50c army want to flood the thread with glowing praise for this release then they're welcome to it.

Oh, and by the way...

Code: Select all

chris@BOSSDESK:~$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 1.898s (kernel) + 2.211s (userspace) = 4.110s

[MALsPa]

Even Ubuntu 16.04 did a better job of installing and configuring and, like MX-16, is far better aimed at the desktop user, provided you can get past their insistence on sudo for everything which is nearly as bad as MX-16's need to become root to even scratch your nose.

LOL! Great line!

Anyway, as for the rest of your comments, point taken. I think Stretch is a pretty good release, but things could always be better. "Great" is kinda exaggerating things. I think you're right that Ubuntu 16.04 and MX-16 are both "better aimed at the desktop user" (depends on which desktop user you're talking about, maybe). Still, no complaints from here -- I've seen a few bugs and glitches but nothing I can't deal with. Plus, I seem to have gotten my money's worth, once again.

[Lysander]

Why? I was under the impression that this was a forum where open discussion was not discouraged and that aspects of this distribution that we use could be talked about in a sensible way. What better place to bring a point of balance than a thread which, if allowed to continue in such a way as you seem to propose would have us seen as no more than ostriches, burying our heads in the sand to avoid seeing or hearing facts that we don't want to acknowledge.

Would it not seem equally ridiculous if we were to have a separate thread where the shortcomings of Stretch were allowed, but any positive comments not?

Open discussion is definitely encouraged, however, almost the entire rest of the board currently focuses of Debian 9's problems and issues.

Therefore, it would seem ridiculous to have a thread focusing purely on Stretch's shortcoming with the forum's current high focus on Stretch's problems. Likewise, it would not seem ridiculous for there to be a thread focusing purely on Stretch's shortcomings if the rest of the forum were full of praise for Stretch - but this is not the case.

[woteb]

Fact: If you have a machine with an existing swap partition and take the default Debian (or most other Linux distros) installation, it will format that partition and a new UUID will be allocated. When this happens and you start one of the other distros it will go looking for the old swap UUID and continue to look for it for some 90 seconds, after which it will give up. The solution is to correct the UUID in /etc/fstab, following which the problem will not recur.

This is very easy to repair: Just edit as root on every installation /etc/fstab the line for the swap.
Remove the UUID and replace it in /dev/sda3. In this situation swap is on /dev/sda3, use your own situation and save the file.

An example:

# swap was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=1ed583c1-e6a3-43e5-997e-f6c83c1b1c78 none swap sw 0 0

replace this in:

# swap was on /dev/sda3 during installation
/dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0

Reboot and problem solved. In this situation all installations swap use /dev/sda3 because /etc/fstab is forced to it.

[ruffwoof]

Debian is indeed great. You only have to look at how it is the source (huge image) .. the horse's mouth.

From my perspective a failing is in the 'Stable' title. Debian Stable means unchanging i.e. only critical or security issues are fixed, otherwise stays the same. As that 'Stable' title tends to be misinterpreted as representing solid. Fell for that myself (being a relative newbie). A better label would perhaps be 'Release'

Debian is a truly great distro. Debian 9 ... well that's newly released and as such bugs can be expected as the testers prior to release cannot test anywhere near as much nor as quickly as the general user-base. A answer to those unwilling to partake of running a new release is to hold off for a while and let things settle. There's a good argument IMO for just running with old-stable versions providing your hardware works with that and you're content to use older versions of programs (often newer versions of programs are more cosmetic than enhanced functionality).

A greatness of the Debian distro is the choice. You can install/run in a manner than best suits your needs/objectives, ranging from oldstable right up to the very latest test versions. Countered by extremes of stability (as in solidness). Personally I've toe-dipped into Stretch, but found issues that likely sooner or later will be resolved. So for the time being I'll be sticking with Jessie as, as far as I'm concerned, that's been rock solid for me (if it ain't broke don't fix it). In a year or maybe two, hardware permitting, perhaps only then will I consider upgrading to Stretch.