Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Re: [BLUG] I don't think Linux will ever be ready for the Desktop

I went off on Debian users who use unstable instead of stable (or testing) hurting Debian development during a job interview once... only to discover that one of the people interviewing me ran Debian unstable. -- This was before Debian got the experimental/development/what-not line, something they adopted to work around the broken behavior of their users.

The reasoning was simple: users that ran unstable both weren't testing the current product, and made it harder for developers to make changes which may break things. This led to some packages not being updated as regularly as they should be for fear of breaking this large user-population. As I said, they've since changed things to work around this behavior, and the more frequent updates make things better, too.

Oh, Debian is one of the few large and complete distros still targetting the PPC Mac hardware. I normally use Ubuntu, but when PPC stopped being a supported platform I found Debian was much more reliable.

I'm also really looking forward to trying out Debian GNU/Hurd once it is ready... Debian is so much more than just Linux.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On May 5, 2010 9:36 PM, "Jonathan North Washington" <jonwashi@indiana.edu> wrote:

On 5 May 2010 19:50, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> You are correct. I was confusing the n...

I have a good friend who runs Debian stable [on his Apple hardware,
incidentally] because of exactly the problems Joe has been talking
about.  I.e., he wants things to get better (read: more stable and
safer, not more "featureful") when he updates.  When he wants things
to become more featureful, he either compiles from source or waits for
a new release and dist-upgrades.  And for the most part he's happy
with it (as he puts it, he's trained his computer into not being
annoying, and the easiest way to do that was with linux), and makes
fun of me for running unstable :)

--
Jonathan


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