Re: bits/news from the users of Debian?
Hello,
I saw a link to your survey from LWN, and wanted to reply to it because of it's
friendly and inviting tone. I'm not subscribed to the list (but maybe I should
do that...).
I first touched a set of Linux diskettes around 1995, and have been dabbling
with it on and off since then, with increasing intensity. About 4 years ago, I
took the plunge and became a 100% Linux user on my home desktop, and I haven't
regretted it for a minute. I'm a professional systems developer, and do some
measure of system administration as well. I grew up in the world of DOS and
Windows, and so Unix was not my "entry by birth" into the world of computing. By
now I certainly am addicted to the 'Unix way', although I am forced to use
Windows at my work.
I keep track of all things Linux and FOSS intensively, and find that by far the
most interesting things in computing go on in this huge ecosystem. It is also
close to my heart in terms of philosophy and ethics.
I think during the years I've been trough most of the major distributions:
Redhat, Suse, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, and a few others, and during the years of
experiments and playing around, I have come to know which things about a
distribution that *I* value, and put the highest emphasis on. My last full-time
desktop system was Ubuntu, through a few releases, but I came to realise that I
didn't really want to install a new release every 6 months, and it was sometimes
a bit too unstable for my taste, with too many unfixed bugs.
A year ago, I switched to Debian Etch full time on my desktop. At the same time
I realized I was becoming increasingly disappointed with Gnome, and so wanted to
check out if Linus is right, and switched to KDE. And boy do I agree! I love
KDE, and wouldn't switch for the world now.
What my personal preferences in a desktop system amounts to are:
- Highly stable
- Bugs quickly resolved
- New release about every 2 years
- Good hardware support
- A huge array of packages to choose from
- A rock solid and versatile package manager/system
- A window manager that doesn't get in my way, or tries to be smarter than me,
but allows me to easily just configure things the way *I* like it.
Those would be the mainpoints. So where I am now after all my travels, the Etch
+ KDE combination is what comes closest to fit that bill, and I enjoy it
tremendously. I've become picky over the years, and I really have to give big
kudos to the Debian team, for providing such an excellent system to us. Thank you!
Current annoyances with my desktop system are:
- With the current kernel the boot process freezes hard about every 15 boots on
average. The kernel update before that one froze hard the same way, roughly
every 5 boots. The kernels before that did not have a problem. I should probably
overcome my hesitation with the Debian bugzilla, and try and submit a good
bugreport.
- When X starts, there's a wait for 10 seconds, whilst my Dell monitor displays
"Cannot display this resolution", until it finally starts correctly. This was a
problem in Ubuntu as well, and after hours of xorg.conf tinkering I've given up,
and I just live with it.
- The Wine package is (IMHO) completely broken, and I use the one from winehq.
- There's an issue with having to get drupal5 from testing. It should at least
be in backports, if at all possible.
- Adept, which would be my preffered package manager on the desktop, does not
work when interactivity is required with the package install ("unable to display
frontend kde"). It displays a curses frontend which simply doesn't work on the
display. I've tried fixing it from various tips to no avail. So I use aptitude,
which is a very fine tool indeed.
- In aptitude, pressing 'C' should display the changelog for the package, but
only does so 1 out of 20 times. Otherwise it's 'unavailable'. Would be very nice
to have it always just work.
- I've set up bridging network (TUN,TAP) to facilitate host nic access in
VirtualBox machines. For some reason it takes the bridge about 10 seconds during
the boot process to acquire an IP address. Without the bridge there's no problem.
- Getting iceweasel and icedove to have working links and mailto: links was
manuel work. Shouldn't be necessary.
- Working sound required manual tinkering.
- In xorg.conf I had to change 'ati' driver to 'radeon' to get X going at first.
But I do have to say that I still love Debian. It takes a bit more manual
tinkering to get everything set up right, as compared to e.g. Ubuntu, but once
it's done, I get much more of that robust feeling, and things just work, day in
and day out, which is what I need from my primary home system.
The packages I use the most are:
- Iceweasel
- Icedove
- Krusader
- Wine
- Virtualbox
- K3b
- Vlc
- Kplayer
- OpenOffice
I do have the popularity-contest package installed, and install it on all Debian
installations which I'm in charge of.
Besides using Debian for my desktop system, I also run it on a couple of small
office servers which I administrate, and of course Debian is the perfect server
OS (but then you knew that). I intend to continue to deploy Debian servers
around the place, and to take the plunge and run it on a VPS, serving my mail
and other things. That will be fun.
By the way, I would love to have a seperate 'server' and 'desktop' cd for
Debian, optimized kernel and package selection for those 2 scenarios. I think
it's something Ubuntu gets right. Other wishes I have for Debian is to continue
to improve the ease-of-configuration on the desktop. Good GUI tools are a must,
and Ubuntu has a slight edge here. No doubt the desktop is by far the biggest
challenge in the OS world.
You are free to do with these comments of mine as you wish.
Again, thanks for Debian! It's a marvellous OS, with a bright future ahead I'm sure.
All the best,
Lars Bjerregaard
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