Debian User Forums

Freind, you’ve got some legitimate gripes there. What is so great about this Debian stuff, anyway? Stable in Debianspeak doesn’t necessarily mean robust, solid or reliable. It means that there are no system upgrades to break your installation. I have a few nits to pick with Debian too. Almost everyo...

Poor ol’ Dedoimedo. Apparently he hasn’t read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile. If he had he would understand better that the last thing anyone needs is a Central Governing Body making the big decisions for everyone. Tinkering, trial and error, lots of different examples and experiments are what ...

The question is why is Red Hat preferred at all by anyone? $350 per year for a workstation computer is outrageous for an individual. Consider an analogy. If you own a home and the toilet breaks you have to fix it yourself or pay a plummer time and materials as you go to fix it. You have to take a da...

Oh Gawd! The damn United States Post Office is coming out with a Steve Jobs postage stamp. Are they gonna do that for Stallman?

Freedom is just there for the taking. It doesn’t foist itself on anyone. Either you take it or you don’t. Besides, freedom isn’t free. All of Debian’s update servers, data centers, bandwidth subscriptions etc. cost real money as well as time and energy. Linus Torvalds is paid to develop Linux. Witho...

I dig where you’re coming from. Spread the gospel and all that. But freedom doesn’t need publicity.

Do you remember when Steve Jobs died and he almost became Saint Steve? What a god awful fawn fest that was. Fortunately someone wrote a column in the New York Times saying, essentially, hold on a second, Steve Jobs was a major a*hole. Don’t grow up to be like him, boys and girls. That pretty much ni...

one stumbling block that steers interested users away from Debian and towards other choices is the perception of at least some level of user-unfriendliness. Yes, that is so obviously true. For example, having to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list by hand to get updates, having to install the time daemo...

Thanks for the responses. The Windows experience has conditioned me to distrust upgrades.

Has anyone done it before? If so how did it go?

Hello Friends, I just read this in the Debian Administrators Handbook. http://debian-handbook.info/get/now/ Does it work? That is, does the upgrade go over without unforeseen difficulties? Would it be better to reinstall a new stable release instead of upgrading? I would appreciate any insight you c...

This is not my first Linux Distro, I was on Ubuntu earlier and before that meddled with Elementary OS, CentOS, Scientific Linux and Fedora, but never came across anything like Debian thats sits perfects between having stable but (very) old packages and having latest but un stable stuff. It niether ...

If it’s free how come everyone doesn’t use it? One of the reasons Microsoft and Apple are who they are is because they bend over backwards to provide what’s called backwards compatibility. I have software that I bought in 1998 that still runs on Windows 7, 8 etc. The open source crowd doesn’t like o...

The alternative is to remain shackled to obsolete software. Oh, piffle! Have you heard the ancient proverb? Our software isn’t old, it’s well tested. The whole appeal of debian is that there aren’t all these updates and upgrades getting in the way of your computing experience. Squeeze ‘till the day...

Debian takes a long time to release a new version, which was holding me back from switching. Yes, but that's a good thing. No updates or upgrades to break your installation. Can't argue about working out of the box, though. I had some minor hassles with wheezy. I had to to install the time daemon, ...

Stability is not stable. What you are talking about is robustness or reliability. Stable in Debianspeak means no updates or upgrades to break your installation. I really like these forums but the word stable seems to be misapplied much of the time.

Yes, wheezy is a superb distro. Debian doesn’t get much love these days.

If your computer never breaks you won’t know how to fix it when it does break.

Thanks for the responses. That clarifies. I know the common wisdom is to update security packages etc. As always there is a great big “on the other hand” lurking around the next bend. I’m really starting to think that, as with Windows, if I get a virus or something breaks I may have to reinstall the...

Let me ask you, once one has Fedora running can you turn off the updates and just have the settled down experience? That’s what debian does for the most part. Just run what works and forego the updates.

I don’t know because I’m new to linux and debian is my first install.