Re: Debian crash randomly
On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:30:52 -0500
"Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso" <jordigh@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28/04/2008, Micha <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
> > Actually i recommend sid to everyone except for servers where stable is more
> > suitable.
>
> You must enjoy debugging a lot, then. Sid really *is* unstable, like
... Sid really *is* *stable* *unlike* the name sounds. Not sure what you did to
make it give you trouble.
> its name sounds, and like we can witness with Mond and with me. Newer
> software is hardly ever necessary. For the fabled "desktop use",
> stable is pretty good (websurfing, MSFT office documents, chatting,
> multimedia), and there is no way I'm installing anything but stable on
> grandma's machine. Stable doesn't crash, it does what it's supposed to
> do, and it gives free software a good name.
>
But supports nearly nothing current. Firefox is ancient. Doesn't run most flash
sites. Openoffice is pre dinosours and especially in terms of office
compatability it has come a long way. Latex now support unicode and stuff. Lyx
which I use a lot has an immense amount of new features. Octaves is actually
usable. I can go on ...
stable is what gives free software a bad name because unknowledged people
things that it is old, featureless, useless and with no eye candy (which
fortunately or unfortunately people want)
There are also numerous packages nowadays that make life for the windows user
(and some linux users) more tolarable. Take for example automatic mounting of
external drives (pmount, pmount-hal, hal and their frontends), easy network
management (network-manager and nm-applet), ntfs write support (ntfs-3g),
bluetooth applet, ...
And no, I don't enjoy debug and I don't get to debug anything I
didn't write and mess up myself or work on donating new features to existing
packages.
> Backports are rarely necessary, and if there is a user savvy enough to
> know that they want something newer than what's in stable, I recommend
> them to try a backport, and if that doesn't work, then to compile from
> source. Otherwise, I really question why do they need newer software.
>
Compiling a source tends to be more intimidating to most people than using
unstable and most new sources a hell to compile on stable.
> Hardware compatibility is a different issue. If they have hardware
> that's too new for the etch kernels, then I will recommend testing,
i never recommend testing
> with many reservations. But I don't recommend unstable to anyone
> unless they're willing to tolerate the occasional crash and possible
> data loss. This is Debian's official position too regarding the three
> distributions. "The unstable distribution is where active development
That is a common misconception, search the mail group history on some dev notes
on the subject. There was a long talk regarding changing the names of the
distributions due to this. It's been suggested:
stable -> server
testing -> don't use this one
unstable -> desktop
> of Debian occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers
it's where modern packages that have not yet been tested to death by debian
devs live but that have usually been tested rather well by the developers. The
only issues I've ran into are the ocational library version incompatibilities
that are always resolved in a day or two. and appart for the one issue in the
last 10 years where I had to downgrade qt4.4 to qt4.3 and keep it at that
version for a couple of days due to binary incompatability with lyx and once
where I had to hold libglibc2.0 for a couple of days, don't recall why, I
haven't had any instability.
> and those who like to live on the edge." Debian newbies presumably
For those who like living on the edge there is experimental. Which I use
regularly and I haven't had any issues there either.
> don't want to live on the edge. Debian also recommends that you run
> stable, and they don't make a distinction between running stable on
> servers or on "desktops".
>
Stable is meant for servers not desktops
> I run testing most of the time, with the occasional non-critical
Which in my experience *is* really *unstable* except around release freezes
> unstable package, but that's because I like bugs. :-) When I can, I
> will poke around the source code to see if I can find why a particular
> piece of software is segfaulting.
>
> - Jordi G. H.
>
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