On 08/27/2013 07:22 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 11:55 +0000, Curt wrote:What a traitor (or not)!"arch traitor" ;) since I prefer Arch Linux and my explanations might be a "traitor's kiss", since I referred to the KISS principle.
I am still a big Arch fan myself. But after a couple years I found myself drawn to Debian Testing as the Arch developers (ESPECIALLY Allan McRae, the current maintainer for Pacman.) have begun to take a fiercely arrogant attitude and a "we know better than you, so shut up" tone toward anyone who would question some of their decisions.
The last couple major changes in Arch seemed like changes for changes sake as well (systemd, while I really do love it a lot, just doesn't seem to fit with how I understood Arch was supposed to work. And I still believe to this day that the old BSD-like sysv setup they had before was loads simpler to configure.) And I still don't understand the point of the lib/bin merges they are doing, aside from the fact it's a blatant violation of FHS.
I used Gentoo for a bit, but its problem is the opposite of Arch: Whereas Arch is making pointless, unnecessary changes, Gentoo seems to be pretty stagnant and stuck in its ways. Gentoo actually is a distribution I actually think would benefit very well with systemd. OpenRC, though its goals are laudable, I've only ever seen it basically just become a sysv-init clone that accomplishes next to nothing new. My other gripe about Gentoo was it just got to be just too much work just for basic system upkeep. The USE flags were incredibly useful and powerful for customizing my packages and how my system would globally work, but all too often setting them globally would just result in Portage griping and refusing to install software, and setting USE flags individually per hundreds of packages is way too much work, effectively meaning Portage ended up getting in the way of what was supposed to be its own most powerful feature.
I think Debian works pretty well. It's not as flexible or powerful as Arch or Gentoo, perhaps, but it's definitely better for servers than Arch or Gentoo. But it's not without its flaws. I think Debian's obsession with free software conformity is, indeed, a weakness. Before you blast me, I'm just going to point out I subscribe more to the Torvalds school of thought on open source, NOT the Stallman school. Richard Stallman over-politicizes/idealizes the idea of open source, tries to make it almost a moral/spiritual thing in a context and industry where moral/spiritual choice is as a whole, irrelevant and actually pretty counterproductive. For a long time (Until recently, in fact.), Debian desktop users had to use third party repositories just to get decent multimedia support into Debian. Why? Because Debian developers questioned whether over half of the codecs most people needed were "free" enough.
I think my opinion is made worse by the fact I just plain do not like Richard Stallman both as a person or as a representative of the FOSS world. And despite all of Debian's good faith efforts to try to conform with Richard's idea of what "free" means he still basically regards Debian (And pretty much all Linux.) with contempt. This is probably less to do with whether or not Debian complies with his "free" ideas and more for the fact the guy is pedal-to-the-metal bitter and oh-so-very jealous that Linux succeeded in every place GNU failed (Such as actually being an operating system.), which is why he insists on the "GNU/Linux" moniker, which is utter nonsense (Using the GNU toolchain doesn't magically make Linux GNU, and he uses some of the most insane logic to try and justify a pretty transparent attempt to take credit for Linux's success from those who actually DID make Linux a success. It is a crying shame the Debian people, in their futile attempt to get Stallman to like Debian, actually comply with the GNU/Linux crap. Linux is not GNU, get over it. It only uses the GNU toolchain (And even then, not always, look at Android.)). So all Debian got for their effort to be "free" is that to make Debian a really good desktop the users have to work a little harder than they should.
The Torvalds school of thought is actually based on something with a lot more relevance and something far more objective: Software quality. Open source ends up being a lot more effective and in a load of cases the better option in a software deployment in production environments (The Internet basically runs on Linux these days.) provided the open source you use isn't worrying about whether its "politically correct" so much as makign sure it's the best quality option. "Use what works best."
Debian's other problem is this need to split packages. A lot. Debian likes to brag about having a HUGE repository, but when you actually look at it, it's actually an AVERAGE repository made "bigger" by the fact that when you install software, despite the fact it downloads and installs up to 12 packages for the same thing it really is basically just ONE package. I don't actually see the purpose in why Debian has to split its packages dozens of ways especially when you still end up having to install them all anyway. Someone explain this to me.
You can read on many mailing lists that people often try to explain something with the argument that "we" should be better than the "competitors" or that "we" should follow a radical policy, but there are no "competitors", just other teams and other projects and Linux isn't a political party. I guess users who see the FLOSS communities as "competitors" or who care to much about ethical concepts, misunderstand that Linux aim is to be "lukewarm", to provide something for every human, the passion for Linux usually is to get rid of thinking that something is "superior".
Competition is a healthy thing. I actually tend to feel when someone becomes top dog they start getting careless and lazy and stop trying to be competitive. Look at Ubuntu, around 2008 it stopped being a quality distribution that cared about its community and became pretty much the Windows of the Linux world, complete with a company that develops it who absolutely refuses to listen to their users.