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[–] 116 points 10 months ago (1 child)

😭😭😭 debian is a treasure and we will all be worse off if you succeed in bullying it

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    But I want my computer for dicking around in the garage, mowing the lawn. and getting a fresh beer. Involuntary dad noises are the prelude for all that. This is the best ad copy for a distro I've ever heard. Next you're gonna tell me it's predictable and stable and stoically gets things done.

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  • [–] 42 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I've been using Debian for so many years (damn, I feel so old).

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Since 2002 here. Now get off my lawn.

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  • [–] 33 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    As a dad who makes said noises, and a linux devotee, I approve.

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  • [–] 28 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    I use fedora as a daily driver and debian for everything that just needs to do one thing for possibly decades to come with as little maintenance as possible.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    get this, what if your daily driver needed as little maintenance as possible?

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    My set of requirements for a daily driver is very different. From experience, I'll end up with a frankendebian that requires much more manual intervention and has a high risk of breaking during updates.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    I would use Debian more if I didn't have to remember whether to use apt or yum every time I ssh'd into a random server on my network.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    I think this is why some people use Neofetch (and its contemporaries).

    It helps give a quick rundown of server specs, OS, etc to help remind you of the command mindset you need to be operating in when you connect to a new machine remotely - just quickly run your info tool of choice.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Yeah, or I could put something in the prompt, I've considered writing an alias or function so instead of yum or apt I could just run install and let the system run what it must.

    It's not really a big concern, though. I don't run that many systems and I reimage them with different distros often enough that it hasn't been worth addressing for me.

    Thank you for the suggestion though!

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago

    Debian is so boring (I love it from the bottom of my hearth and use it in all my servers and personal laptop)

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago

    As a dad who mostly runs Debian.... Yeah I can't deny it.

    Still my top preferred for stability though!

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago

    For me debian sounds more like a steam roller. It just works. I installed debian on my first laptop 20 years ago and I know that if I just kept dist-upgrading it every day it would still be running today.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago

    Checks out.

    I am a dad who makes that sound and also use debian.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    It hasn't committed suicide in me yet.

    Software app just pinwheels though, but apt works.

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    No snaps, no PPK, Stable AF, Steam just works, Even on a Hybrid video card laptop.

    It's more dependable than a hell of a lot of dads.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    Awww, mocking my favourite distro. Tried so many. Not a fan of persistent tinkering. I use Debian because it's awesome for me and my family to use as daily driver.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    I've always loved debian. There's a reason it's a favorite on servers, and so many distros are built on it. Stable, reliable, gets the job done really well. As long as the job doesn't require the newest packages.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago

    This is the first thing I have actually learned about Debian lmao I already respect it

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago

    Debían DILFs interact

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (10 children)

    I lost a lot of respect for Debian due to the way they handled the whole issue with xscreensaver.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    That's a super long thread, is there a good summary somewhere for those of us who suffer from "bookmark this for later and then never revisit it" flavors of neurodivergence?

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    The gist of it is jwz, the maintainer of xscreensaver, received a ton of bug reports for bugs he fixed ages ago because Debian refused to update to a newer version citing "stability" as a reason. He added a warning dialog to his software to warn users that they are running an outdated version and to not report bugs to him. Debian maintainers patched it out because they are legally allowed to do so according to the license. I consider this is GNOME level of assholery. They decided on a shitty policy and then made it someone else's problem.

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Having just read the whole thread;

    xscreensaver developer jwz added an allcaps/all bold notification to xscreensaver that says that the current xscreensaver version is really old. This notification could not be user canceled / okayed through. The author did this because he apparently received several emails about xscreensaver versions that were years out of date.

    Debian stable's policy is to make no updates unless they are security or bug related. This directly conflicted with jwz's policy of only supporting the latest version of xscreensaver.

    The Debian maintainers chose to remove the unskippable warning as the other options were harder to maintain / worse to use. This was specifically permissable in the xscreensaver license, but against the authors stated wishes to have xscreensaver removed entire if the warning could not be kept or the software could not be updated.

    Of note, jwz escalated to yelling at the first reporter about this in his first email and swearing at another reporter in his second. The Debian stable team offered suggestions which would direct Debian users to the Debian development team for bug reports about the old versions of xscreensaver, but jwz's hostile approach made that not happen at all.

    If I install debian stable it's because I want it to work, and to not be bothered about anything that doesn't need to happen. That's whole point of having Debian stable around. One of the points made in the discussion, which I strongly agree with, is that Linux software is managed in a repository, not individually. A windows program telling me out of date is obnoxious, but expected. A Linux program telling me it is out of date is a obnoxious and unexpected. (Fucking discord...)

    The xscreensaver author shot himself in the foot with this one; presumably he wanted to avoid being harrassed over old versions of xscreensaver. What he ended up doing was telling everyone with an old version of xscreensaver that they need to update and then guaranteed they would harass thim about it by not giving the users an option to ignore and walk away from the message.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    I consider jwz response entirely reasonable. The initial message immediately suggests going against his wishes and the rest of the thread is about whats good for Debian which is a project that jwz never wanted to be involved in but suddenly its his problem. If I where in his situation I would tell them to go fuck themselves as well. Its just incredibly disrespectful to the person who did the actual work.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    The initial message immediately suggests going against his wishes and the rest of the thread is about whats good for Debian

    Well yeah. This whole thread was started in the Debian bug tracker. Of course the focus is going to be on what's good for Debian. The fact that jwz showed up immediately means they followed the Debian bug tracker, which begs the question, why would jwz subscribe to that if they didn't want to be there? It also sets the tone for the whole discussion. Original reporter was whiny, but, like, it was directed at the Debian team, not jwz. jwz chose to insert themselves into the Debian bug tracker discussion, and also chose to be aggressive about it.

    If I where in his situation I would tell them to go fuck themselves as well. Its just incredibly disrespectful to the person who did the actual work.

    That's fair, honestly. jwz owes the Debian team fuck all. But the other half of that is that the Debian team tried to work out a middle of the road solution and were met with immediate hostility.

    You can't work with someone who doesn't want to work with you, so you do what's best for your project and just move on.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Doesn't seem like there where any great replacements for XFCE's screensaver without potentially breaking things.

    Debian isn't the only stable distro, it and distros like it fill an inarguably societally important role at this point. Its reasonable to not push patches unrelated to bigfixes and security to a stable distro.

    Its also reasonable to expect a developer to figure out a way to send canned responses to bug reports, and also require a version number with bug reports, throwing out any with missing or outdated versions. You know, because there are going to be people with outdated computers no matter what their distro does. Who knows, maybe I'm crazy.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    Given the number of times I've had to triage issues caused by mispackaged Debian builds, I'm baffled that Debian maintainers are under the impression that their users generally know they're supposed to report problems to the package maintainers rather than upstream. Maybe people who've been using Debian since the naughties do, but for the average user, Debian seems to be crafted specifically to generate duplicate upstream issue reports.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    What about their handling didn't you like?

    It sounded like they were put in a pretty crappy position by the upstream adding a grumpy warning message. It's also not like they were shipping a dangerous vulnerable old version or something, they backported security fixes into the stable version like with every other package, it just didn't have new features and improvements and the dev was sick of being asked by users to support the old versions.

    Patching out the message (which was effectively PUP malware) on testing and then porting that to stable and shifting the default to LightDM and LightLocker in future releases seems like a good solution. I probably would have dropped xscreensaver altogether in future versions (which is what the author suggested) for being malicious, but at the time there weren't a lot of reliable alternatives and it was better for users to still have the option.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    I think they should have either dropped the package or at the very least renamed it so people stop bothering jwz. Making the upstream developers deal with LTS versions they never intended to support is incredibly disrespectful.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    This is a challenge all distributions have which want to keep stability, which means shipping older versions (ideally with long term support) with only security updates for the lifetime of the distribution. It's totally ok for upstream developers to not support any of those old versions too; they're not being paid either.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    i use a fedora, like a peep not just getting off the couch - but goin out and doin stuff-

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)
  • "come on... do something..."
    waits for 3 years
    skeleton.jpg

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