Dear Conrad,
Regarding the Debian's advantage and disadvantage, any one can point but
comparing two persons, their ideology is not that simple.
Richard stall man stood for a nobel cause. If he hasn't taken such a
project called GNU, we may have used only freeBSD and its kernel and may
not be Linux. This is because Linux is just a kernel. Kernel may be
compared to brain of a OS but it is definitely useless without the other
parts of the system.
GNU can use BSD/hurd/Linux kernel and is working with all the three.
Currently Debian is supplying all the three. I agree, Linux gained more
fame but that doesn't mean, you can very well go and disrespect others.
Richard just stresses the point, we will not be in a position to know
what is being done by the proprietary software in your system. If you
are willing to go with it, no body stops you.
I would say better than skills, we should value other's ideology and
their noble contributions. I am in no way arguing that Linus have done
less. All good for the IT world.
Cheers,
Balamurugan R
On 08/27/2013 08:37 PM, Conrad Nelson wrote:
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.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/521e1e0b.70...@gmail.com