Debian desktops (Re: SUSE Linux Days Road Tour)

[Michael Butash]

Well, the week didn't help that mid-term I had to spend 2 weeks in new 
york, but all in all it took me about a week to figure out enough 
caveats throwing errors to figure out that:

a) Biggest issue was ati drivers not working beyond 3.15. I forgot how 
much video card vendors suck when it comes to linux, especially ATI.  
They are still the most featured, at least as far as multi-monitor desktop.

b) Bleeding-edge cpu/southbridge chipset are and always will be 
problematic until they get beaten up and shamed in the linux community 
for at least a year - expect issues.

And I did, so the issues were of my own doing.  RTFM, or at least the 
release notes...

So yeah, aside from that, debian has been so/so, but I'm an old 
command-line guy to, so I can fix it usually even if requiring to drop 
to a vty.  All the goodness of ubuntu, without having to gut unity every 
time to make it work is a good thing.  What has been getting me is 
getting all my packages back, and dependency issues.  Much of the good 
stuff is of course compiled for ubuntu, and seems to wreak havoc on some 
of the testing packages.

Virtualbox for instance, either the default repo or oracle package would 
work because of some obscure krb5 symbol missing from packages.  A long 
thread from almost 10 years ago on a thread was the only reference, and 
led me nowhere.  Then I realized it hadn't pulled in any krb5 
dependecies, so added those... Which broke my packages, and removed half 
my os in my haste to note what all it was removing with a big list of 
packages.  Ugh.

I ended up having to find a bleeding trusty ubuntu libasn1.1 package and 
forcing it in (I love dotted decimal notation, but really?) to fix a now 
broken dependency, which allowed me to reinstall everything it gutted, 
the rest of the krb5 libs, then vbox would work.  And all I wanted was 
my goddamn visio app server (aka xp in a vm!)

I've had a few adventures like that in my first week on a debian base.  
Other than that, it's been pretty darn solid with Mate. Mate itself has 
some quirks, but unlike anything using compiz, doesn't start a steady 
destabilization of my video card until it ends up choking the os its own 
bile.

One interesting note was watching LibreOffice freak out the GL driver 
and start soaking up about a gig of memory every 30 seconds.  Watching 
htop, I began to see I was going to lose a good 3 hours worth of work, 
and had to begin killing pids, when I found a mate component at the base 
somehow in the mix soaking up the memory.  Killing that long enough to 
save my work off in Libre worked, and shutting down libre restored 
stability.  Ugh.

I think


On 07/25/2014 08:50 PM, Kaoru Wilbur wrote:
> So, I am what some people have been calling "old School". I started 
> out when Potato was released. That was about 15 years ago. I used it 
> for porting, testing and in fact, used to do testing or unstable just 
> to help me understand more and test stuff out.
>
> Wow, a week of fallout is intense.
>
> Personally, I like using the CLI. It saves time, resources, and such. 
> Ubuntu has some nice features but I definitely am not drinking the 
> Canonical Kool Aid.
> What I really liked to do back in the day is port stuff to Debian 
> because a lot of companies were doing it for RH and didn't care about 
> Debian. Another thing I liked to do is test out hardware - this card, 
> this module.
>
> The truth is Debian is free software and that philosophy was one I 
> agree with. I had a fully free machine when I attended college. I 
> finished my degree with no proprietary software whatsoever for my 
> undergrad. Also, everyone I knew was using Debian, Richard Stallman, 
> Emmett Plant, Don Marti. Of course, these are the Masters and I, alas, 
> just a Journeyer (well on Advogato, that is).
>
> Debian is kick ass for learning how things work, getting things to 
> work, but, does take time and devotion, right.
> At least I can stand by a community effort and not some proprietary 
> commercial entity.
> I'm not saying Canonical hasn't done some good things. Sure. I just 
> don't like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Hannah Montana Buntu...
>
> Also, I prefer Raspbian on my Banana Pi. No Ubuntu there.
> So, I know everyone has their own likes.
> For example, I really did like Knoppix. It's a solid tool. Ubuntu 
> would never let me know "why" something is throwing an error. It just 
> throws it.
>
> What I think - Debian has been and always will be my friend ;)
>
> Of course, you could ask 100 people and 100 different opinions may be 
> had. I'm not saying mine is right at all. Debian is right for me. I 
> try other distros. In fact, I'm going to try Arch on my banana out of 
> curiosity.
>
> I have tried Mint. MInt is nice. It all depends on what you want to do 
> also.
> I suppose as far as community is concerned, if you drink the Canonical 
> Kool Aid, you can hang with that crowd.
> If you like Dead Rat, you can hang your hat,
> If you like Debian... well, let's just say, it's a different portion 
> of the community.  :)
>
> Come into the light, Michael!!! :)