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When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

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edbarx
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When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#1 Post by edbarx »

I am currently struggling with Wheezy to detect properly the GPU. Yesterday, and on about a couple of occasions before, I compiled the kernel from source after some tweaking in the hope that the custom kernels detect my GPU. However, it is becoming evident, that it will not be easy to get rid of this bug. The solutions suggested to me by the developers, have not worked till now, and the bug looks very difficult to correct, even for a professional developer, let alone for me!

The struggle: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38718

So, the golden question is, when Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?
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vbrummond
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#2 Post by vbrummond »

Aside from the cons that I mentioned (all my opinion or personal observation) each of these distributions are pretty good.

Fedora: Too new and short support cycle.
Ubuntu: Seems like it is much heavier on resources; unclear future; rapid constant changes.
OpenSUSE: Tends to have a lot of bugs for me.
Arch: I prefer to have at least some choices made for me now and then.
Gentoo: I am patient but not that patient.
Puppy: I prefer Gnome.

To be quite honest I am hoping Debian continues to work for me. I think out of all of them I would consider Fedora.

Also for your bug is the problem in the kernel or the xorg stack?
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kevmitch
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#3 Post by kevmitch »

As a routine user of testing/unstable, I never consider changing distros to solve a problem. At most, I will investigate how another distro does things differently to make things work better and file a bug report with Debian regarding my findings.

If however, you don't have the stomach for the constant churn in testing, and a bug affecting you is fixed in a newer version of some software, then Ubuntu or Fedora would be the way to go.

Since you already say that you're running wheezy, it seems like the second case doesn't apply. I would therefore recommend trying to solve the problem in Debian testing with possibly some select packages from unstable as this usually has equal or newer software versions to other distros. If on the other hand it is an unfixed regression, select packages from stable might be the way to go. One of the things I like best about Debian is the ability to shift between several versions to diagnose/solve problems.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#4 Post by Bulkley »

kevmitch wrote:As a routine user of testing/unstable, I never consider changing distros to solve a problem.
I second that.

BTW, when I want to test another kernel, I go to Liquorix. Easy to try, easy to remove.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#5 Post by dasein »

Historically, the distro that kept "calling me back" was Mandriva. With Mandriva all-but-dead now, I watch Mageia with great interest. Mageia 1 seems solid and stable. (However, their forums are the most actively repressive I've ever seen, which leaves me quite leery.)

In my experience...
  • Fedora: Never really quite stable. Zillions of tiny "paper cut" problems

    Ubuntu: Several versions of *bunu refused to install on my hardware. At some point, I just quit trying. But if Wheezy is too unstable for you, then Ubuntu (based on Sid) is only going to be worse.

    SUSE: Slow. And. Plodding.

    Arch: Two words: unsigned packages. (And even if they were to implement package signing tomorrow, Arch just feels like everything is always just a little bit harder than it has to be.)

    Mint: Linux is not about Mideast politics. Really.
One alternative to consider is MEPIS--long past it's glory days, and a weird vibe from their community/forum. But if you like KDE, MEPIS does a nice job. However, MEPIS is based on Squeeze, so it may not be "cutting edge" enough for someone running Wheezy.

confuseling
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#6 Post by confuseling »

SUSE - especially, but not exclusively, if you like KDE. Never experienced the fabled slowness (I think a lot of people are talking about YaST, which did used to be quite slow to load but is OK now, or Yum, which I've had no occasion to use. Zypper probably is slower than apt in some ways, but not relevantly. If your package manager takes 15 minutes to do an update instead of 10, does it actually matter?).

Most distros are buggier than Debian. Simple answer is to use a version that is 6 months or more old, for a closer analogue of Debian's stable.

Fedora also has a good reputation, but personally if I wanted bleeding edge I'd probably go with Arch.
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sidRo
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#7 Post by sidRo »

-> Ubuntu LTS or CentOS or SL.

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Telemachus
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#8 Post by Telemachus »

Slackware or one of the BSDs (probably OpenBSD or FreeBSD in that order).
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BowCatShot
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#9 Post by BowCatShot »

You could purchase Red Hat and have them fix your problem for a fee.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#10 Post by lbm »

Hopefully it will run forever, absolutely my favorite Distro, no-one comes close.

If the impossible should happen, I think I would go with CentOS, at least for server. A free community edition of Red Hat, and it is very stable.
For Desktop, I am not sure if I would go with CentOS, do the lack of experience in this matter.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#11 Post by Anzhr »

dasein wrote: Arch: Two words: unsigned packages. (And even if they were to implement package signing tomorrow, Arch just feels like everything is always just a little bit harder than it has to be.)
But because the packages are unsigned Arch feels faster. /end joke

Mint Xfce (based on Wheezy) or Xubuntu are my current fall-back distros. Last week I had to get a box running again quickly and installed Xubuntu (I only had a regular Unity Nasty Narco Ubuntu disk on hand but installed Xfce from Synaptic) and so far it's quite snappy.
Xfce, Wheezy

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#12 Post by smallchange »

It looks to me like this problem might be solved by running sid/testing with sid as default release. That will upgrade your xutils-dev and your kernel, if I followed that whole bug report correctly. I also think that is the best way to use testing with a minimum of trouble.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#13 Post by pendrachken »

confuseling wrote:SUSE - especially, but not exclusively, if you like KDE. Never experienced the fabled slowness (I think a lot of people are talking about YaST, which did used to be quite slow to load but is OK now, or Yum, which I've had no occasion to use. Zypper probably is slower than apt in some ways, but not relevantly. If your package manager takes 15 minutes to do an update instead of 10, does it actually matter?).

Most distros are buggier than Debian. Simple answer is to use a version that is 6 months or more old, for a closer analogue of Debian's stable.

Fedora also has a good reputation, but personally if I wanted bleeding edge I'd probably go with Arch.
SuSe is hit or miss. Way back when I had it on my laptop 10.0, 10.1 and 10.3 ran quite decently on the ancient 600MHz hardware.... 10.2 crawled at a snails pace. One thing I do still miss from SuSe is Yast or at least a Yast equivalent where you have a central control dash to the guts of your system.... it was kinda nice having your NFS / Samba share exports within a few clicks of your firewall and networking configs and not have to always remember what files to edit by hand. Plus Sax2 for Xorg config was usually pretty painless.

I wish Debian would start work on a cross desktop control center instead of relying on the desktops themselves to implement stuff ( glares at KDE4's regressions of having to launch systemsettings as root to change the little bit of system level stuff they have ). It isn't strictly NEEDED but is a nice feature to have, and you don't have to use it - you can still manually edit every config file by hand for the finest grain control you could want.
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#14 Post by Roel63 »

When Debian fails, I guess each and every Debian-based distro will fail as well.

I can't say I have an alternative in mind, but I've seen SUSE and it didn't disappoint me much.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#15 Post by Llewton »

seriously people should be warned about arch. some might go for it never realizing how risky it is and what they're, ahem, signing their computers onto.

somebody mentioned liquorix... i found the bloody acpi and its entourage to be very unstable on my thinkpad under liquorix. on the backported .38-2 everything works like a charm, however. and that's just one example (including high cpu loads) over the past several months when kernels tested by debian simply worked better than liquorix. the project is actually great, and probably good choice for lots of people. but i'd always rather run stuff from debian repos especially something as crucial as this.

as for the thread..
"when debian fails". seriously. let's have a show of hands and see how many people experienced a "debian fail" that meant they had to - not wanted to but had to - move to a different distro. i'm talking about the official stable release, of course. experiment with other releases, help developers develop, report bugs and fix issues, and enjoy it, but don't rubbish debian for your problems as a tester. i've seen with my own eyes servers running debian in facilities in some big european countries. those are the sort of places where they would rather rip out their own arm and eat it than risk an unstable not to mention failing system. therefore: to bring the functionality and stability of debian STABLE into question is imho either unintentionally or intentionally malicious.
once again: only debian stable is what the project actually gives to the world to use and stands behind as usable and reliable.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#16 Post by edbarx »

Llewton wrote:as for the thread..
"when debian fails". seriously. let's have a show of hands and see how many people experienced a "debian fail" that meant they had to - not wanted to but had to - move to a different distro. i'm talking about the official stable release, of course. experiment with other releases, help developers develop, report bugs and fix issues, and enjoy it, but don't rubbish debian for your problems as a tester. i've seen with my own eyes servers running debian in facilities in some big european countries. those are the sort of places where they would rather rip out their own arm and eat it than risk an unstable not to mention failing system. therefore: to bring the functionality and stability of debian STABLE into question is imho either unintentionally or intentionally malicious.
once again: only debian stable is what the project actually gives to the world to use and stands behind as usable and reliable.
My case is entirely genuine. The bug has been accepted by Debian as a serious bug qualifying as: important. It is so difficult to correct, that it has been forwarded upstream to freedesktop.org. The latter, awarded the bug the status of a medium blocker.

The bug is so serious that the display is turned off BOTH FOR THE SIX TERMINALS and GUI (X). So, unless one intends to log onto Wheezy from a remote terminal, one has to grope in the dark without the use of a VDU! Now, if that is not serious, pigs must fly better than eagles. As to your remark that using Wheezy is experimenting, well I must do it, because clearly, the bug is very serious, and I have to give feedback to the developers that my GPU is not properly handled by the kernel. If you read the bug thread, you will learn that the developer concerned, is working on the kernel to correct the bug. Moreover, I cannot expect the developers to correct my bug without giving them feedback by actually trying their suggestions on my system that is known to fail.

This is an excerpt from the bug report:
So the mode we set is subtly different to the BIOS's:

FPB0: 0x00021307 (n = 2, m1 = 19, m2 = 7)
FPB1: 0x00031108 (n = 3, m1 = 17, m2 = 8)
DPLL_B: 0x99086c00 (enabled, non-dvo, spread spectrum clock, LVDS
mode, p1 = 4, p2 = 7)
DPLL_B_MD: 0x00000003
HTOTAL_B: 0x06df063f (1600 active, 1760 total)
HBLANK_B: 0x06df063f (1600 start, 1760 end)
HSYNC_B: 0x068f066f (1648 start, 1680 end)

and our's:
FPB0: 0x00021607 (n = 2, m1 = 22, m2 = 7)
FPB1: 0x00021607 (n = 2, m1 = 22, m2 = 7)
DPLL_B: 0x99086c00 (enabled, non-dvo, spread spectrum clock, LVDS
mode, p1 = 4, p2 = 7)
DPLL_B_MD: 0x00000000
HTOTAL_B: 0x07cf063f (1600 active, 2000 total)
HBLANK_B: 0x07cf063f (1600 start, 2000 end)
HSYNC_B: 0x06a9067f (1664 start, 1706 end)

The first point to work out is why we are using a much larger blanking width
than the BIOS (which affects our choice of clocks) and presumably throws us out
of the panel spec.
This was written by the developer because I have no idea how drivers are implemented internally.
Last edited by edbarx on 2011-07-11 21:15, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#17 Post by vbrummond »

Yeah, after all of your effort I really hope the bug gets resolved. :)
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#18 Post by golinux »

PCLinux OS is very slick in a Windozeish way and it worked out of the box for me. It now has Gnome and XFCE versions so I was tempted except . . .

It doesn't use apt!!!! Old habits die hard . . .
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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#19 Post by bmc5311 »

edbarx wrote:So, the golden question is, when Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?
:roll:

d e b i a n.

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Re: When Debian fails, what is your next distro of choice?

#20 Post by dmhdlr »

Arch! Because it's fun when it breaks because it's supposed to break!

I'm new to Debian, but if Debian were to break I'd just reinstall Debian and try not to do something stupid to break it. If it's brand new hardware being exotic I'd give Ubuntu another I shot I suppose!
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