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My needs have changed, so has my distro.
Many, many years ago I abandoned Microsoft Windows and replaced it with various flavors of Linux. It was long ago, when men were men and the differences between distros meant more than the choice of KDE or Gnome, or the default wallpaper.
It was a time when a distro would be made or broken by the ISO you burnt. It was just as likely that your distro of choice would panic and be unable to read your hard drive as it was that it would boot. In that day and age, the idea of an auto-configuring X server (xfree86 then) was insane, and at that time most distros didn't even ship "conservative" configs to get your system running. You were just to setup on for your own system, since it's not too hard.
Boy, have the times changed! Or maybe it's just me. Perhaps it's a combination of both. I know right now that what got me by then doesn't meet my needs today.
One of the first distros in those days to catch my interest was Debian. I don't recall which version of Debian it was, but I do know that it was at the forefront of hardware detection at the time. Debian, Mepis and Linspire (it may have been called Lindows back then, I forget) sharing the same core all worked well. I vaguely recall running Damn Small Linux for a while too, but that's based on Debian too! It was a while before I got to the point where I was able to run Debian "proper" since it required configuration, so I settled on SimplyMepis. I quickly geeked out and moved beyond the hack-a-thon that was Warren Woodford's brainchild and installed Debian myself.
Since then, I've been a Debian fanboy. Debian powers the PC I'm using right now to type this and this PC is located in my company's office. Yes, I'm one of the people able to use Linux at work too. I haven't used Windows for more than checking my Gmail in at least 5 years. Debian powers my home file server. I've even put Debian on my phone once. Debian runs the servers at work that I've deployed and it runs the server that this site is hosted on. Can you tell that I mean what I say when I use the term "fanboy"?
My love of Debian is why when I told some friends I was replacing Debian on my home PC there were rounds of "Yeah, right". But it's true. Debian is not on my home PC at this moment, and it will probably be erased from my work PC later this week. I've already got the ISO ready...
Sometime in my progression, I moved from "liking to tinker" to "needing to have a stable system". It was gradual, because it sort of sneaked up on me when I finally got sick of Debian Sid "breaking" and I moved to the then-frozen Debian Lenny. I liked updates, not a moving platform. I was fine with Lenny for a while. On some occasions, even impressed, especially as the new Moreblue Orbit (Wallpaper and GDM Greeter pictured below) theme moved into it (or maybe I pulled that from Sid at the behest of a friend, I forget...)
This week, Katherine Noyes over at Linux Insider sent me a link and asked for some input on a recent movement by Canonical Ltd. It seems that Mark Shuttleworth has decided to take on Apple. It's not enough to be popular, like Windows, but you have to be good. To advance Linux further, users need to be given something more than a simple clone of Windows. People are leaving Windows for Linux, but they're leaving for Apple too. Mark's goal is to capture those migrations, and inspire more by infusing Linux with some consistency and originality not offered by either Apple or Microsoft.
It all sounds great, and Mark is even tossing money at it to do it. What mattered to me though, was the discussion about this that I ended up having on Libervis about the state of the Linux desktop in general, drives for innovation and change. Our discussion was simple, from "designing good themes" to complex "What would the impact be if Gnome 3.0 was based on Qt 4?"
The conversation really drew things into focus for me. I once dismissed Ubuntu for being "the new distro" and being "over-hyped". More than that, my experiences with it have actually been pretty poor in general. Samba would poll the network forever causing network latencies, applications would crash and act goofy. A year ago, I had every reason to dislike Ubuntu.
Today, not so much. Today, I've got a home PC powered by Ubuntu Intrepid. Why?
1.) My need for stability has become a factor important enough to affect my decisions.2.) I still like the latest and greatest.
On good days, Sid is just fine but on bad days (sometimes lasting a week) I'd get stuck between Gnome 2.20 and Gnome 2.22 and left sorting out all of the breakage caused by that transition. You get goofy migrations in rolling distros, and you get old software in stable ones. For the longest time, I've considered these two things to be at odds. Lenny right now is "new enough" for me to be comfortable using, but will it be that way in 9 months? Probably not, and I'm left with "use old" or "use rolling". Stability wins out now but leaves me unsatisfied. Ubuntu's fast-paced but "snapshot" release cycles meet both. Ubuntu is current but the releases are on a snapshot. I can expect "the latest gnome" to be working, and even if there are updates and changes, I don't have to expect being stuck in-between for much. I get current software with a modicum of stability in the repos and in the software itself. And by the time it begins showing it's "age" and the hype is rising about the next version, I'll have a new release on the horizon.
3.) I like lean systems.
This is something I've always faulted Ubuntu for, having the "kitchen sink" installed. Through a random thought I wondered if it would be possible to install Ubuntu the same way Debian does, from the ground up. Go figure, it can be. Using the Server install with the Alternative disk, I was able to do an encrypted LVM install with a JFS root just like I can on Debian. Ubuntu might hide it's "power" but it doesn't eliminate it. I'm able to install my first choice applications rather than the ones Ubuntu likes most. I don't like Mono so it's not on my system. I can't fathom why Transmission is the default BitTorrent client when Deluge is so nice.
4.) Free Software no longer matters to me.
This transition and realization was probably the first one I made. I posted a blog article when I decided to quit funding the Free Software Foundation. I love freedom and the free market. The principals of the free market and free software go hand in hand - choice, competition, mutual benefit, anti-monopoly, property rights, et cetera. I loved standing for those freedoms and reminding people (mostly users) that their computers are theirs and that they had control.
Unfortunately, it became clear to me that Free Software began meaning less "freedom" and more "my way". Freedom can only come from the minds of sentient individuals. There's no such thing as "collective freedom" and there's no such thing as "freedom by force". Yet to some, like Richard Stallman, the goal became to oppose proprietary software by any means, even using law to prevent people from making their own choices. You can't lead people to freedom by violence, but that's exactly what the Free Software movement had become. I long ago realized that I was only free if I had choices. Knowing the impact of those choices, I've chosen to install non-free software on my systems. Non-free like the nVidia binary driver and Flash from Adobe. I'm aware I'm somewhat restricted so long as I choose to use them, but I'm quite capable of choosing something else (like nouveau or swfdec, respectively) if I don't accept those terms. I am free and the license of the software on my system doesn't affect that.
Yet Debian still clings to that idea. Sure, there's the non-free repo and I truly respect Debian's desire to make the user's choice important. But the simple fact of the matter is, as long as I know what my options are, I don't care what the license of the software on my system is anymore. One of the reasons I used Debian was because of the time and effort they put into making sure that the main repo was 100% Free Software, and while I do love and respect the commitment to principle, those principles no longer mean that much to me.
It should be noted that Ubuntu does focus on Free Software. Everything they write is Free Software and the super vast majority of Ubuntu is free software. The new installer will even have a "Free Software only" option, and Canonical sponsors the development of Gobuntu. What benefit that Ubuntu has is that doesn't give users two degrees of separation from "Ubuntu" and "Non-free".
5.) I like innovation.
As I recapped not so briefly at the start of this article, when I began using Debian it was at the forefront technically. Hardware support on Debian was top notch, creative things were being done, improvements added. This was a different world today. The innovators of yester-decade, Debian and Gentoo, are now "second bests" to the likes of Canonical's Ubuntu and Red Hat's Fedora. This is perhaps the saddest realization but perhaps the best one too, since there's still innovation happening.
As a Debian fanboy, I asked another Debian fanboy friend last night "When was the last time Debian did something "radical"? They used to be amazing for new features, new behind the scenes things (dpkg, defoma) and new presentation. Today, with the release of Etch behind us and the pending release of Lenny, all of the improvements in those two versions came from elsewhere. Meanwhile, Fedora is blazing the trail with integrations of PackageKit, PolicyKit, Pulseaudio. Canonical's Ubuntu team is releasing boot-up optimizations in the likes of Upstart, and before that demonstrated great improvements to Xorg with "Bulletproof X", Windows settings migrations and such. Love the features or not, Fedora and Ubuntu are very much the drivers for change on the software side of things now.
More so, Ubuntu is shipping on Dell computers now. While that doesn't mean much to me as a hardware savvy geek who saves tons by building my own systems, it does mean that Ubuntu is gaining leverage. Developers are using Ubuntu, so developers are developing and packaging for Ubuntu. Software vendors like VMWare and Zimbra are working with Canonical and those tools are being integrated and optimized for use with Ubuntu. That kind of leverage can't be ignored either.
It might be important to point out that both Fedora and Ubuntu, the two distros I'd consider in the vanguard of innovation, share a similar approach. Both distros release on a similar 6 month cycle, but more than that, both distros have a goal oriented approach to releases. Fedora's list of goals for the upcoming Fedora 10 release include things like "Enhance support for HDTVs" and "Improve management and handling of printers". Likewise, Ubuntu has announced "There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One of
them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible..." and "Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications." A results-oriented approach seems to be key in providing new features and creative ways of using new tools to improve existing features.
In closing, I still love Debian. It will be running my servers for quite a while and for architectures not based on i386 or AMD64, Debian's wide support for those architectures make it a fine choice. Debian package maintainers are glorious folks who labor over their packages to make them work well and they show a level of quality unmatched in the Linux world. This isn't a Debian sucks rant, and shouldn't be taken as such.
This is about my needs and wants as a desktop user and while I'm sad to see that Debian is no longer meeting my needs, I'm quite happy that I've got enough options and that there's now even something better.
It was a time when a distro would be made or broken by the ISO you burnt. It was just as likely that your distro of choice would panic and be unable to read your hard drive as it was that it would boot. In that day and age, the idea of an auto-configuring X server (xfree86 then) was insane, and at that time most distros didn't even ship "conservative" configs to get your system running. You were just to setup on for your own system, since it's not too hard.
Boy, have the times changed! Or maybe it's just me. Perhaps it's a combination of both. I know right now that what got me by then doesn't meet my needs today.
One of the first distros in those days to catch my interest was Debian. I don't recall which version of Debian it was, but I do know that it was at the forefront of hardware detection at the time. Debian, Mepis and Linspire (it may have been called Lindows back then, I forget) sharing the same core all worked well. I vaguely recall running Damn Small Linux for a while too, but that's based on Debian too! It was a while before I got to the point where I was able to run Debian "proper" since it required configuration, so I settled on SimplyMepis. I quickly geeked out and moved beyond the hack-a-thon that was Warren Woodford's brainchild and installed Debian myself.
Since then, I've been a Debian fanboy. Debian powers the PC I'm using right now to type this and this PC is located in my company's office. Yes, I'm one of the people able to use Linux at work too. I haven't used Windows for more than checking my Gmail in at least 5 years. Debian powers my home file server. I've even put Debian on my phone once. Debian runs the servers at work that I've deployed and it runs the server that this site is hosted on. Can you tell that I mean what I say when I use the term "fanboy"?
My love of Debian is why when I told some friends I was replacing Debian on my home PC there were rounds of "Yeah, right". But it's true. Debian is not on my home PC at this moment, and it will probably be erased from my work PC later this week. I've already got the ISO ready...
Sometime in my progression, I moved from "liking to tinker" to "needing to have a stable system". It was gradual, because it sort of sneaked up on me when I finally got sick of Debian Sid "breaking" and I moved to the then-frozen Debian Lenny. I liked updates, not a moving platform. I was fine with Lenny for a while. On some occasions, even impressed, especially as the new Moreblue Orbit (Wallpaper and GDM Greeter pictured below) theme moved into it (or maybe I pulled that from Sid at the behest of a friend, I forget...)
This week, Katherine Noyes over at Linux Insider sent me a link and asked for some input on a recent movement by Canonical Ltd. It seems that Mark Shuttleworth has decided to take on Apple. It's not enough to be popular, like Windows, but you have to be good. To advance Linux further, users need to be given something more than a simple clone of Windows. People are leaving Windows for Linux, but they're leaving for Apple too. Mark's goal is to capture those migrations, and inspire more by infusing Linux with some consistency and originality not offered by either Apple or Microsoft.
It all sounds great, and Mark is even tossing money at it to do it. What mattered to me though, was the discussion about this that I ended up having on Libervis about the state of the Linux desktop in general, drives for innovation and change. Our discussion was simple, from "designing good themes" to complex "What would the impact be if Gnome 3.0 was based on Qt 4?"
The conversation really drew things into focus for me. I once dismissed Ubuntu for being "the new distro" and being "over-hyped". More than that, my experiences with it have actually been pretty poor in general. Samba would poll the network forever causing network latencies, applications would crash and act goofy. A year ago, I had every reason to dislike Ubuntu.
Today, not so much. Today, I've got a home PC powered by Ubuntu Intrepid. Why?
1.) My need for stability has become a factor important enough to affect my decisions.2.) I still like the latest and greatest.
On good days, Sid is just fine but on bad days (sometimes lasting a week) I'd get stuck between Gnome 2.20 and Gnome 2.22 and left sorting out all of the breakage caused by that transition. You get goofy migrations in rolling distros, and you get old software in stable ones. For the longest time, I've considered these two things to be at odds. Lenny right now is "new enough" for me to be comfortable using, but will it be that way in 9 months? Probably not, and I'm left with "use old" or "use rolling". Stability wins out now but leaves me unsatisfied. Ubuntu's fast-paced but "snapshot" release cycles meet both. Ubuntu is current but the releases are on a snapshot. I can expect "the latest gnome" to be working, and even if there are updates and changes, I don't have to expect being stuck in-between for much. I get current software with a modicum of stability in the repos and in the software itself. And by the time it begins showing it's "age" and the hype is rising about the next version, I'll have a new release on the horizon.
3.) I like lean systems.
This is something I've always faulted Ubuntu for, having the "kitchen sink" installed. Through a random thought I wondered if it would be possible to install Ubuntu the same way Debian does, from the ground up. Go figure, it can be. Using the Server install with the Alternative disk, I was able to do an encrypted LVM install with a JFS root just like I can on Debian. Ubuntu might hide it's "power" but it doesn't eliminate it. I'm able to install my first choice applications rather than the ones Ubuntu likes most. I don't like Mono so it's not on my system. I can't fathom why Transmission is the default BitTorrent client when Deluge is so nice.
4.) Free Software no longer matters to me.
This transition and realization was probably the first one I made. I posted a blog article when I decided to quit funding the Free Software Foundation. I love freedom and the free market. The principals of the free market and free software go hand in hand - choice, competition, mutual benefit, anti-monopoly, property rights, et cetera. I loved standing for those freedoms and reminding people (mostly users) that their computers are theirs and that they had control.
Unfortunately, it became clear to me that Free Software began meaning less "freedom" and more "my way". Freedom can only come from the minds of sentient individuals. There's no such thing as "collective freedom" and there's no such thing as "freedom by force". Yet to some, like Richard Stallman, the goal became to oppose proprietary software by any means, even using law to prevent people from making their own choices. You can't lead people to freedom by violence, but that's exactly what the Free Software movement had become. I long ago realized that I was only free if I had choices. Knowing the impact of those choices, I've chosen to install non-free software on my systems. Non-free like the nVidia binary driver and Flash from Adobe. I'm aware I'm somewhat restricted so long as I choose to use them, but I'm quite capable of choosing something else (like nouveau or swfdec, respectively) if I don't accept those terms. I am free and the license of the software on my system doesn't affect that.
Yet Debian still clings to that idea. Sure, there's the non-free repo and I truly respect Debian's desire to make the user's choice important. But the simple fact of the matter is, as long as I know what my options are, I don't care what the license of the software on my system is anymore. One of the reasons I used Debian was because of the time and effort they put into making sure that the main repo was 100% Free Software, and while I do love and respect the commitment to principle, those principles no longer mean that much to me.
It should be noted that Ubuntu does focus on Free Software. Everything they write is Free Software and the super vast majority of Ubuntu is free software. The new installer will even have a "Free Software only" option, and Canonical sponsors the development of Gobuntu. What benefit that Ubuntu has is that doesn't give users two degrees of separation from "Ubuntu" and "Non-free".
5.) I like innovation.
As I recapped not so briefly at the start of this article, when I began using Debian it was at the forefront technically. Hardware support on Debian was top notch, creative things were being done, improvements added. This was a different world today. The innovators of yester-decade, Debian and Gentoo, are now "second bests" to the likes of Canonical's Ubuntu and Red Hat's Fedora. This is perhaps the saddest realization but perhaps the best one too, since there's still innovation happening.
As a Debian fanboy, I asked another Debian fanboy friend last night "When was the last time Debian did something "radical"? They used to be amazing for new features, new behind the scenes things (dpkg, defoma) and new presentation. Today, with the release of Etch behind us and the pending release of Lenny, all of the improvements in those two versions came from elsewhere. Meanwhile, Fedora is blazing the trail with integrations of PackageKit, PolicyKit, Pulseaudio. Canonical's Ubuntu team is releasing boot-up optimizations in the likes of Upstart, and before that demonstrated great improvements to Xorg with "Bulletproof X", Windows settings migrations and such. Love the features or not, Fedora and Ubuntu are very much the drivers for change on the software side of things now.
More so, Ubuntu is shipping on Dell computers now. While that doesn't mean much to me as a hardware savvy geek who saves tons by building my own systems, it does mean that Ubuntu is gaining leverage. Developers are using Ubuntu, so developers are developing and packaging for Ubuntu. Software vendors like VMWare and Zimbra are working with Canonical and those tools are being integrated and optimized for use with Ubuntu. That kind of leverage can't be ignored either.
It might be important to point out that both Fedora and Ubuntu, the two distros I'd consider in the vanguard of innovation, share a similar approach. Both distros release on a similar 6 month cycle, but more than that, both distros have a goal oriented approach to releases. Fedora's list of goals for the upcoming Fedora 10 release include things like "Enhance support for HDTVs" and "Improve management and handling of printers". Likewise, Ubuntu has announced "There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One of
them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible..." and "Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications." A results-oriented approach seems to be key in providing new features and creative ways of using new tools to improve existing features.
In closing, I still love Debian. It will be running my servers for quite a while and for architectures not based on i386 or AMD64, Debian's wide support for those architectures make it a fine choice. Debian package maintainers are glorious folks who labor over their packages to make them work well and they show a level of quality unmatched in the Linux world. This isn't a Debian sucks rant, and shouldn't be taken as such.
This is about my needs and wants as a desktop user and while I'm sad to see that Debian is no longer meeting my needs, I'm quite happy that I've got enough options and that there's now even something better.
#1.1 Re: Re: My needs have changed, so has my distro.
Kevin Dean, <E-Mail> / 17 September, 6:15pm
Thanks for the comments Dennis.
In regard to using Fedora, it would be my first choice except for one thing. RPM. I'm not one of those "RPM sucks because Debian is better" guys. I was THRILLED when recent (but not the most recent) versions of Fedora improved RPM but everytime I use it it fails for me. I'm not sure if it's the repos or the packages themselves or the dependancy resolvers, but even a 100% default install of Fedora chokes itself to death when RPM and I are put on the same computer.
I haven't been able to use Cent, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva or any of those distros because of RPM. In my experience, RPM based distros just suck.
If Fedora moved away from RPM (which will NEVER happen, I know) I'd probably make that switch but until then it just feels to fragile for me.
Fedora has all the benefits I mentioned above, and I like the Fedora Artwork Crew's tastes MUCH better than Canonicals'. :)
[ Reply (0) ]
#2 Re: My needs have changed, so has my distro.
Dennis Wronka, <E-Mail> / 22 September, 4:24am
It's strange that you have these problems with RPM.
I actually favor neither RPM- nor Deb-packages, as usually both work quite fine for me.
What exactly is the problem you have with RPM? Or maybe this would be something we could better discuss on Nuxified.org, if you wish.
What I have experienced is that the Fedora-guys sometimes push out updates that require updates that aren't available yet. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but it has happened.
But that's actually all that has happened to me in terms of Fedora's package-management (which in my opinion cannot be credited to RPM anyway) playing tricks on me.
Also 3rd party RPMs, like Skype and Opera, work fine.
[ Reply (0) ]
#3 Re: My needs have changed, so has my distro.
I really like a lot of the stuff you had to say. The point that Debian hasn't done anything "radical" in a long time really struck a note. I recently wrote an article comparing Debian and Ubuntu and as a die hard Debian Dweeb I was thinking it would give me more ammo to fire at the "nubuntu" users. After studying Ubuntu behind the scenes, reading about Canonical, and seeing the direction things are going I have even considered making the switch to Ubuntu. The problem with it is that I currently run a Debian blog/news site and I wouldn't feel right working on that and not using Debian. I'm stuck in a Linux conflict of interest.
Thanks for the post!
[ Reply (0) ]
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#1 Re: My needs have changed, so has my distro.
I can fully understand you.
I have made this transition some time ago too.
I have started out using Linux in 1999 with Suse 6.2, which I used for a long time.
I also used Slackware for quite a long time, same goes for Linux from Scratch.
These were the times where I used to compile everything I wanted to add to the base-system, including stuff like X or KDE.
Now I am running Fedora, one of those distros you list as the drivers of innovations, and I totally have to agree.
Fedora always comes with a lot of new stuff, and with every new release you can feel that things are moving.
Better PulseAudio-support, better integration of SELinux, KDE4, ... You name, they got it.
And although it's pretty much bleeding edge it's a stable system.
I am also one of those lucky few that can earn their money on a Linux-box, so that one, after running Debian at first, now also runs Fedora, simply because in my opinion the packages Debian delivers are too outdated for desktop-use.
Also, just like you I so far have discarded Ubuntu as being totally over-hyped, still I sometimes recommend it to people interested in Linux as from all I hear it's pretty easy to use, and doesn't go down that "enforcing freeness"-path as much as Fedora does.
By the way, a good solution in between Debian and Fedora/Ubuntu might be CentOS. It's quite interesting as it has long support times and it's also quite well tested. It's not as bleeding edge as Fedora, but a lot closer to that than Debian.