August 16 was an especially big day for this island of stability
  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
    333·
    1 year ago

    Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don’t believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.

    Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don’t have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.

    So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.

    UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it’s the problem of making a boot medium. Debian’s approach is to say “Here’s a list of ISO files, bye!”. That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying “Tough luck to them”. I think that’s a shame.

    UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it’s just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring “discussion”? I don’t get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      7·
      1 year ago

      (Pure) Debian is almost never recommended for noobs, I don’t understand the discussion. People would usually recommend Mint for Windows users.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yeah but why is it not recommended for noobs? I was a noob once and I managed on Debian just fine - once past the ordeal of working out how to make the boot stick. That is what I really meant by “hard to install”, but everyone took it to mean the installer software, which has been noob-friendly (if ugly) for years now. I should have been clearer about that.

    • 31337@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 year ago

      What? I installed Debian last week, and I think it took something like 4 clicks, and setting my username and passwords. I installed it because I couldn’t get Ubuntu or OpenSuse to install (guessing because I have a 3090 GPU paired with an old intel 4770k/Z97 chipset).

    • rustydomino@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I get your point - but here’s the thing: your average Windows user doesn’t even know how to install Windows. And for a good subset of them, even installing a browser extension is a challenge.

    • wolf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      IMHO it is really hard to talk about installers.

      I 100% agree that the Debian installer has a lot of room for improvements, just from the top of my head

      • Make default installations much easier
      • Collect needed information before installation starts (instead of the a little information, a little installation process at the moment)…

      OTOH, and that is the main selling point: The installer is very flexible, if you know what you are doing and my specific needs are therefore easier served with the Debian installer than that of other mainstream distributions.

      In the end, I would happily see a username-password-one-click default option for the Debian installer while not taking anything away from the current one. (Just move all the input to the front.)

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        My point should have been clearer. Wasn’t talking about the installer, which AFAIK is now pretty much as simple as Ubuntu, only uglier. I was referring mainly to the real obstacle of getting Linux up and running: making the boot medium. I mean, really, expecting noobs to know how to do that, or else just hinting vaguely about what 3rd-party tools to use, or how to use dd etc - come on, that is just not realistic. Others disagree but IMO this very much is Debian’s problem to fix.

    • spider@lemmy.nz
      1·
      1 year ago

      Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user.

      Here’s a more user-friendly workaround.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        About downvoting, as far as I can tell Lemmy’s default sort order is Hot, so most recent. But I usually switch it to Top, so by points. IMO downvoting to disagree is a complete anti-pattern. Effectively what you’re doing is silencing someone as a lazy alternative to expressing your disagreement with them. Literal cancel culture. They knew this 20 years ago, hence Slashdot abandoning downvotes in favor of words like “Interesting”, “Funny”, “Irrelevant” etc. But that was too complicated for the R-site, so here we are.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      01·
      1 year ago

      Hm I dont agree that its fine once running.

      • upgrading is a total pain. I can imagine many people just dont do that at all. Like, no official documentation, anywhere you can actually find it? No automated command? Literally manual editing of a sources file?? Checking for held or not upgraded packages again to avoid breakage?
      • apt is pure garbage. Nala is king, and I think they should switch.

      I think a fully self updating and upgrading Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite with actually good presets would be user friendly. This means no broken Firefox, flathub, automatic updates, some services enables, some fixes here and there. Easy install, everything preset, install Flatpak apps through the GUI and forget it. Automatic upgrades should be held a month or so to avoid breakages.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yes of course. But the apt frontend is horrible. Nala wont fix the completely manual upgrading process, but it automates some other things like updating the repo metadata.

    • cloud@lazysoci.al
      24·
      1 year ago

      This is absolutely untrue, Debian even ship with proprietary drivers now. Stop spreading misinformation

  • spacedogroy@feddit.ukEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    It’s a great base for general desktop use as well as server. Been using it on my PC for years now, and aside from a few 3rd party repositories it has everything I need. It just works and continues to work.

  • exscape@kbin.social
    16·
    1 year ago

    Nice! I started using it just this week. I built a computer to serve as NAS with Debian and ZFS.

    I’m also considering moving my Ubuntu based server to Debian; it gets too many package updates that I frankly don’t care about, plus even Ubuntu server feels a bit bloated.
    I moved from Gentoo to Ubuntu a few years ago precisely to reduce my workload; I just wanted it to work… and now I’m considering Debian for the same reason.

      • Gamey@feddit.rocks
        1·
        1 year ago

        I started with Ubuntu servers and moved on to Debian, never used anything else much because it always worked great but Redhat clones are supposed to be really nice too and I love Fedora on desktop! What’s the problem with your Rocky server?

          • Gamey@feddit.rocks
            1·
            1 year ago

            Don’t worry too much about that, it sucks but won’t kill Rocky, Alma or Oracle because Redhat doesn’t have the rights to do that, they can just make maintanace of those a lot harder! ;)

  • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been happily running Debian for over a decade. Stable for servers, Testing or SID for laptops and desktops. The original installs not still running and upgrading are ones on hardware too obsolete to be useful (SheevaPlug). Still probably supported by Debian though!

    Including one install that started as Mint Debian Edition, was upgrading to Testing, then cross graded from 32bit to 64bit, been through 3 motherboards and is now Stable for it’s final days before the disk is scrapped.

    I love the pacakaging, the philosophy and all the platforms supported (including really old ones).

    I literally count it among the proof humans are not irredeemable.

    Edit: Expand about “obsolete”.

      • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Absolutely fine. Probably helps I’m a XFCE man so at least my desktop doesn’t suddenly change. I enjoy the constant incrementing of stuff. Gets boring before a Stable release during the freeze.

  • IRQBreaker@lemmy.kozow.com
    91·
    1 year ago

    I really enjoy Debian. I have no need for bleeding edge software releases, what I need is stability. I even run Firefox ESR 😀 It’s quite hard to brick a Debian stable installation (if not doing any extraordinary that is).

    • wolf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Same here. I use Debian on everything for years and it never broke my workflow and I never experienced a breaking update. Since Firefox-ESR also finally works with hardware acceleration OOTB for me, I am very happy.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    74·
    1 year ago

    Never felt the need to pick Debian since it has very old packages but it’s good with choice.

  • zenofpython@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been an Ubuntu user for about 20 years. I’m too lazy to distro hop and never tried debian.

    How does debian compare to kde Ubuntu (kubuntu)? Is it worth the switch?