On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 10:24:25AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote:
Ubuntu is an exception. Although it is derived from debian, it has way more users, mind share, and perhaps engineers. I'm not sure why Ubuntu doesn't cut the tie. Its innovations have just as often been bad as good. I do like their two update and support cycles (every six months and every two years). It is the default distro for many software projects.
Ubuntu's fixed release cycle is one of the things I don't like. If things are not ready, don't release them. They have had some very broken releases over the years due to rushing to get things out for the release cycle. And I think being based on Debian has helped them a lot of times over the years. I think it was last year Ubuntu decided to try changing the dependency resolver in apt. It broke. Badly. It was the main reason the new LTS release was 3 or 4 months late. The fix was to revert to the Debian code that worked. Debian takes time to do things right with an interest in long term sustainability. Debian took a few years to decide on the right way to handle multiarch. Redhat barged ahead and did some quick way to handle it, which has a lot of problems and isn't flexible and extensible. Debian's solution works very well, and now allows an arbitrary number of architectures at once, including installing things that don't even natively work on the CPU which it can then handle using qemu and the binfmt handler. It took time but it really worked in the end. Redhat is stuck with their half baked solution now. Of course now that x86 has mostly switched to 64 bit they probably don't even care anymore.
I've not used debian much. I very much respect the project's structure and goals. I have been unhappy with its slow pace of package bug fixes and updates -- their freezes don't seem to match the nature of software change these days. Backporting fixes seems like the wrong approach once change gets high-volume. Lennart seems to thrive with debian, and his opinion carries a lot of weight with me.
In most cases bug fixes are quite fast, but of course Debian is entirely a volunteer project, unlike fedora and ubuntu and such that have corporatians behind them that can dictate what must be worked on. Backporting fixes is very much the right things to do. You fix the known bugs while usually avoiding introducing new bugs that are added as new features are being worked on.
I like Fedora. Mostly. It has been very good for my uses. I wish that there were a more stable version for some of my systems. There's too much of a discontinuity between RHEL (and clones) and Fedora. It does adopt new versions of packages quite quickly. Fedora updates come fast and furious. I like the open source purity of Fedora but sometimes that is uncomfortable -- much less these days.
I used to use redhat for a number of years, back when they had a desktop version (long before fedora was invented). I eventually gave up on it because the bugs at the time were simply too much, and they had apparently no interest in fixing them and not even any interest in bug reports from users if they weren't enterprise paying users. Buying their CD sets didn't count for anything. Of course once I started using Debian and learned how dependencies and package management could actually be done, and especially the difference in how the source packages were structured, I lost all interest in anything rpm based. The structire of an rpm is simplistic junk compared to how clean and organized the debian format is. There is no consistency in source rpms, they are largely just a pile of scripts that get run on top of some patches. The use of debhelper in debian makes for a much much more consistent package design, that is much easier to work with, and so much more is automated which results in a more consistent result (rpm's often have had missing dependencies because it doesn't do nearly as good a job figuring out the needed dependencies automatically).
I used to use CentOS for some systems but the version update process was horrible: the steps were a lot larger and I tended to put them off too long. The drama of Red Hat fighting cloners and damaging users was too much for me.
Yeah the way redhat has treated centos is really sad.
I use Android or ChromeOS, mostly because I don't really have a choice on phones and tablets. They are Linux distros. You can even install Android on a PC.
I don't like Snaps or Flatpaks. For two reasons: library bugs should be fixed in one package, not dozens; library resources should be expended once, not dozens of times.
Yeah I don't use them either.
The time when Flatpak's are justified is for really big things shared by many distros. Think of Firefox. The individual distros probably add no value to it -- too complex. The Firefox developers probably want to handle bug reports without needing to have every distro at hand. The extra cost of duplicated libraries is probably a minor percentage of the resources used by FireFox. Bonus: perhaps whole-program optimization can make a difference (Link Time Optimization is a start).
I will stick with proper packages.
Clear Linux, as I understand it (not necessarily accurate), was a showcase for optimizations, both micro (using particular Intel instruction set additions, compiling with Intel-centric optimizations) and macro (getting rid of cruft that irritated the developers). The Wikipedia article is probably more useful than my opinion. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Linux_OS>. Statelessness is a nice goal. I don't know how packaging stacks would play out in my world.
Personally, I don't find it rewarding to switch distros. I have enough other challenges. I will do it when my current distro become sufficiently uncomfortable. I admit that the last time I switched was when RHL split into RHEL and Fedora Core.
I switched a few times when I discovered something that was much better than what I was using. The last time I found that was a but over 25 years ago. So it was SLS, Slackware, Redhat, Debian. I have looked at mandrake, yggdrasil, suse (We use that at work, I don't know why anyone ever cared about it to be honest), ubuntu, mint and probably a few others. Mint makes a lot of sense if you want something easier to deal with than Debian. Some distributions I haven't bothered to even look at given their design goal was to be simply wrong (Ie gentoo, arch, and a number of others). -- Len Sorensen