Martin Read wrote:
On 21/09/14 04:14, lee wrote:As you can see, it's not only Debian developers I'm disappointed with. Sadly, the quality of Debian has declined over the years --- and I'm not the only one saying that --- and one of the reasons for this might be disregard for the users.My mileage varies; in my experience, Debian in 2014 is a higher-quality distribution than Debian in 2004. The obvious example is that sound (for all practical purposes) Just Works on my current Debian system (all I had to do was pop open pavucontrol and tweak the sliders), whereas in 2004 or 2006 it definitely didn't Just Work.
My experience is a bit different. The release of udev caused all kinds of problems on my server, and made it more difficult to track things down (had to learn new procedures, change old ones, change config files, etc.)
I'm one of those folks who sticks with stable code until the very last moment, before upgrading -- let other people wring out the bugs. Makes for much stabler production systems.
Stuck with sarge and etch until the very last moment. Still running Lenny on a couple of servers, squeeze on the rest -- pretty much have to update the Lenny servers at this point what with no more security, anti-spam, or anti-virus updates. Each time I've updated, it seems like there were more incompatibilities to deal with, more packages that I had to compile and install from upstream, and so forth. And I'm not really changing what we're doing - basic server stuff.
So far, I've tended to stick with a release long enough that I could skip releases on updates. I'm with the folks who stuck with Windows XP to the bitter end and then jumped the Vista debacle entirely (or are paying for aftermarket XP security updates). My Mac is still at 10.6 (and Apple still supports it) - haven't seen any benefits from the updates on my wife's machine (and then woe to all those folks going through iOS 8 updates.
Unfortunately, all this systemd stuff is making it increasingly clear that my next upgrade is to Wheezy, then I start looking for another distro (if only both Xen dom0 and ZFS were available on one of the BSDs - you can't get the combination to work right now; either that or one of the opensolaris derivatives - SmartOS is starting to look very good).
And... by the way, what happened to "old stable" - https://www.debian.org/releases/ now lists squeeze as obsolete.
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra