Re: farewell

[Mo Zhou <lumin@debian.org>]

Hi Marc,

Sorry to hear that. In fact I have some similar feelings.

On 2019-07-23 01:22, Marc Munro wrote:
> I've been using Debian for 20 years and in that time I've never strayed
> to other distributions.  But Buster is too much.

I always fail to find a better free and independent replacement to
Debian.
Even if the current stable release does not deliver the user experience
we expected, what the other distros deliver, I guess, would be more or
less the same. That's because Debian is a collection of scattered
software, where the user experience is not always decided by Debian
itself but the software upstreams.

> 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.  

It's a pity that the "software stores" started to think they know
"what the user want" and decided to silently download .deb packages
preparing for updates without informing the user. Everytime
after I freshly installed a Debian system, I'll immediately
disable packagekit. However, how can a gnome user get rid
of the packagekitd? It's in every distribution.

For sid users automatic upgrades are dangerous. Last year when
unattended-upgrades was somehow enabled by default on sid without
my confirmation, my system was broken by it through blind upgrades.

That said, it's simply that I don't like the design of several
programs. Luckily I still have the freedom to force these programs
to stop: if systemd --disable gdm3 doesn't work (yes, it indeed doesn't
work at all), I can mask that unit by symlinking it to /dev/null. If
masking still doesn't work, I can e.g. `sudo rm -f /usr/bin/gdm3` and
the annoying program will finally stop working.
This is much better compared to the most widely used operating system
in the world where you have no freedom to stop it from doing anything
you dislike.

> Oh, and X11 forwarding no longer works.  I didn't want to hate
> Wayland...

I heavily rely on extremely low key repeating latency and extremely
high key repeat rate. Under Xorg this is as trivial as a single
command:

   xset r rate 160 160

Wayland provides no means to achieve that. That means I will
strongly resist Wayland until the day it started to realize
how keyboard settings are important to weirdos like me.

> 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.

the "improvements".
As per the free software licenses, they provide no warranty. In the
world
of free software when one is not satisfied with some piece of software,
the one will either become a part of the upstream, fork the project,
working around things, or simply leave.

Do you have any suggestion for the Debian side so we can make some
concrete improvements, or mitigate some problems?

> So we're done.  I feel bad, like I'm being disloyal but I can't go on
> like this.

I feel bad at some points too. Be well and have a good day.