Friday, January 8, 2016

Goodbye, Debian 8.1

Goodbye, Debian 8.1 (Jessie). I tried the distro for several months because RHEL clones (Springdale Linux and CentOS, both 7.0 and 7.1) didn't like my legacy nVidia GeForce 6150 SE in this old desktop and it was a pain to fix that. The system still is good enough to do all the work I need to do and performs reasonably well. Debian seemed like a reasonable alternative. I chose to install it with LXDE as the desktop environment which is lightweight and ideal for old systems.

First, Iceweasel is not simply Firefox with the branding stripped out as is often claimed. It slows down, takes all the system resources and locks for anywhere from a few seconds to almost a minute on many websites and does this repeatedly. It did it across multiple versions. Firefox simply works without this nonsense. Of course, I can use genuine Mozilla Firefox on Debian, but only outside their package management system unless I build and maintain packages myself. Yes, other browsers offer better performance on Debian, but for some sites Firefox is my preference and sometimes I really need to test in Firefox.

Speaking of packages, their vaunted large repository would often have broken updates because of version mismatches and/or a lack of timely dependency updates. I also had to give up on Iceweasel language packs for a while because the browser was updated but the language packs were not. I had the choice of a browser with a known vulnerability that wouldn't upgrade or ripping out the language packs. Granted, I don't need browser menus in another language, but a lot of people do and there are things I wanted to test in a localized environment. I've seen this sort of really poor repository/package management in other distros, of course. I just haven't seen it much recently.

Despite the large package selection I was surprised that some very ordinary things I use regularly that are found in lots of other distros weren't in Debian. No matter what distro I use I seem to end up building packages. Debian is no different.

Then there is PulseAudio. Yes, it works. I couldn't get it to remember that I wanted line out as the default, not headphones, so I kept having to change it. Sure, that's a really minor annoyance, but it just works on most distros. User error? In this particular case quite possibly. I just couldn't be bothered to research it. I shouldn't have to spend the time to do so on something that just works in literally every other distro I've tried in recent years.

Performance was decent, but a distro designed to be lightweight can be faster on older equipment. I went back to an old favorite, Vector Linux, who have a very solid release in 7.1, and my system is faster. I'm not supporting Debian for work at the moment so there was no reason to keep it. Look, it's not a bad distro. Most of what I've described is relatively minor and entirely fixable. I don't want to tinker and I do want performance on legacy equipment. Debian 8.1 is simply not the best choice for me.

18 comments:

  1. I'm a former Debian user. I used CrunchBang, which was a nice distro using the Debian repositories. But Debian is so slow to come out with new releases and lags behind the times. And yes, Iceweasel.

    After the discoontinuation of CrunchBang I went back to Xubuntu and was on Trusty LTS release for the last year and just moved to Wily (15.10).

    I've tried Mint and like what they're doing, but they're based on Ubuntu LTS, so that would have meant installing Trusty and I wanted the new 15.10 release, so I stuck with Xubuntu.

    I had some issues with NVidia drivers on Trusty, but up to date drivers for NVidia are now in the repository and installed well.

    I'm using btrfs, which I chose over zfs because it's well and long integrated into the Ubuntu repositories. I had a mishap upgrading a Fedora VM with a ZFS home directory as the zfs modules didn't get installed when upgrading to a new kernel and i had to manually add them back in before I could login to X.

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    1. Hi Lana, i was a user of CrunchBang too :) and i must say its the best distro i ever had simple, beautiful and low on resources.
      Maybe you dont know but now the former continuation of CrunchBang is BunsenLabs you should take a look ;)
      https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

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  2. Were you using Jesse stable, testing, or Sid? I've run into issues with broken packages in testing and Sid, but never in the stable branch.

    Also, I agree with you on Iceweasel. I've had nothing but issues with it, but you know what? I also experience lock-ups in Xubuntu 14.04 using Firefox. Some so bad I have to SSH in from another computer and kill X to get it back.

    I'm looking to migrate off of the Ubuntu family tree soon, so I'll give Vector Linux a look-see.

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    1. Debian 8.1, by definition, means Jesse. I only run stable and I've had multiple broken packages (dependency issues) over the past few months.

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    2. It's Jessie not Jesse.
      Also, can you be more specific which packages were "broken"... one last question, did you report your issues to Debian bug reporting?
      https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting
      If you have, can you please provide a link to your bug reports?

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    3. OK, I misspelled the silly Toy Story name. I'll hang my head in shame when I have time. I did mention that Iceweasel and the language packs were mismatched in terms of versions in the article. There were others, but the problems would eventually get resolved and I didn't take notes. I knew from very early on that Debian wasn't the right answer and, no, I didn't take the time to bother with bug reporting. I am very crunched for time and I just didn't care enough about the distro. I'm not a Linux hobbyist or enthusiast. My work and business, which is what I mainly use the system in question for, have to take priority. I'd rather just use something that generally works well for me.

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  3. Very interesting. I agree with you, even being a huge fan of Debian, I think it's the best to keep it just for servers and let other distros to fork/derivate it and focus on a desktop environment and more user friendly.

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  4. You should be able to use the elrepo.org nvidia drivers on CentOS.

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    1. No, I can't. The GeForce 6150 SE chipset is no longer supported by nVidia and elrepo doesn't have the legacy 304 driver.

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    2. I see nvidia-304xx-kmod-304.131-1.el7.elrepo.nosrc.rpm in the SRPMs directly for elrepo.

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    3. I didn't look at the sources, only the rpms. I may have to try that :D Thank you!

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  5. It is the same with every OS. Do you know anyone that would support all the legacy hardware? Had sound cards working on XP but not on Win7, etc, etc. RHEL 7 does not support the RAID controller from DL 380R05 which works fine in RHEL 6.5 and so on. Should I say goodbye RHEL7 or ditch my machine?

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    1. No, it is most definitely not the same for every OS. Debian, which is what this article is about, supports my legacy nVidea chipset just fine and includes the required drivers. This is one particular area where Debian is decidedly stronger than Red Hat.

      Linux has a long history of being touted as using fewer system resources and supporting legacy hardware longer than any other OS you can think of. I wrote about the need for this in the business world back in 2014, discussing 32-bit systems at the time: http://thelinuxworks.blogspot.com/2014/05/32-bit-enterpise-linux-still-matters.html

      At the time I wrote about smaller businesses and non-profits, but I've had the opportunity to do some work for a Fortune 50 company in the last 13 months or so. You know what? They have tight IT budgets too. In times of economic uncertainty companies cut IT budgets to the bone and leverage their investments for as long as possible. If a system like mine can still do the work there is no reason to get rid of it. So, to answer your question, most businesses would ditch RHEL 7 and keep the machine so long as it's reliable. Fortunately, in the case of 32-bit systems, both CentOS and Springdale Linux have stepped up and provided community alternatives.

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  6. You might take Arch for a spin. I have the same video card and, for the most part, the 304xx driver has worked well. I've never run into broken packages and they're updated very quickly. I installed Arch over five years ago and never looked back.

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    1. I won't consider Arch. Rolling release distros can be a nightmare in terms of troubleshooting and problem solving. I will stick with those that have a known starting point with known parameters.

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  7. I also see that kmod in the el7 x8664 directory. Is this box i686?

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  8. I like Debian as a great base or a distro, but it leaves a lot to be desired itself. I first used SolusOS which is Debian based, and then switched to Point Linux after the demise of SolusOS. I found both to be better than Debian itself. I am a bit of a newbie and started on Linux as an older adult. These distros add what Debian itself is missing.

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