farewell
I feel bad about this, but I'm breaking up with you.
I've been using Debian for 20 years and in that time I've never strayed
to other distributions. But Buster is too much.
Today I logged in to my laptop and the CPU was running flat out, as was
the network. So I looked, and it was packagekitd. So, I disabled and
stopped it using systemd. Then I logged out and logged back in again.
The same happened. And it was still packagekitd. Why? How is this
even possible?. Why had disabling it with systemd not disabled it?
Maybe I could uninstall it? No, Gnome depends on it.
Oh, Gnome.
I wasn't that impressed with Gnome 3 back in the day but I didn't want
to hate it so I gave it a chance. Even when it was pretty flaky, and
everyone, even Linus, was dumping on it.
I learned to like the new interface. Except for the bits that I had to
use dconf-editor to fix. Or gconf-editor. I didn't mind gnome-tweak-
tool or that other settings tool that doesn't seem to have a real name:
the one with the wrench and screwdriver logo.
Why are there so many different ways to manage things under Gnome? And
why do the names of gnome options keep changing? And the names of the
tools to tweak them? And why do defaults keep changing? And why does
window-shading no longer work in so many gnome apps? Maybe Linus was
right about it.
Debian used to be an OS for geeks. For people who weren't afraid of
the command-line and who could figure out how to tweak configuration
files. Stuff that used to be an easy configuration option is now
really difficult or is managed by an apparently unconfigurable and
poorly documented abstraction layer. Like pulseaudio.
I didn't want to hate pulseaudio but the other week, when I wanted to
tweak the surround sound options and google told me which alsa
configuration file I had to tweak, I discovered that pulseaudio had
abstracted it away. And even google doesn't know how to configure
pulseaudio.
I didn't want to hate wpa_supplicant but when it failed to connect to
my second network, it automatically logged back into my first. Even
when I tried to tell it not to. Even when I cancelled the attempt.
Even when I told it to connect to the other network.
I played with a BSD installation the other week. For wireless
networking to work, I had to write a script. I almost cried with joy.
It was the Unix experience I'd forgotten. The ability to tell a
computer what to do, simply, and without having to fight it. Without
having to second-guess it. Without it having so much bloody attitude
that it appeared to think that it knew best and that I was being
unreasonable.
I didn't want to hate systemd but stuff that had worked forever, like
restarting gdm from the command line, hasn't worked for me since
systemd appeared. And what used to be a simple matter of creating a
service by creating a script and putting in a symlink into a runlevel
directory, is now apparently beyond my level of skill to make work.
And binary logs and a "smart" viewer for them? If you want to make
logs flexible, log stuff to a sql database. But only as an option, not
by default. Don't make the log system a point of failure. Don't take
away my ability to use grep on a file. Or awk, or perl, or a script.
That is the essence of Unix and it's being lost.
Oh, and X11 forwarding no longer works. I didn't want to hate
Wayland...
Do you really think this is progress? Removing and making difficult to
access, all of Unix' power and flexibility, and dumbing it down so that
the easy stuff becomes easier but the power-user stuff becomes harder
and harder to access and scripting is no longer a matter of telling the
machine what to do, but rather figuring out how to work-around all of
the improvements.
I know I could probably get past all of this. I could learn the
intricacies of systemd. I could figure out pulseaudio by looking at
the code. I could probably install something other than
wpa_supplicant, or I could write my own replacement. I could choose
not to use Wayland, and I could use Cinnamon or Mate rather than Gnome
3. Yes, I know Debian has that flexibility. But I don't need the
hassle. I want a system that pretty much works out of the box. I
don't mind tweaking a few things but I want a tool, not a challenge.
So we're done. I feel bad, like I'm being disloyal but I can't go on
like this.
I wish you well and I hope you find someone else.
__
Marc
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