12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
9:39 p.m.
dep via tde-users wrote:
The reason I didn't use Debian when I switched
from ) OS/2 to Linux 25
years and two months ago was that Debian was a pain in the ass to install
and configure. Additionally, it was abundantly political. In those days,
computing was like the early days of automobiles -- you were going to
spend a certain amount of time with the thing up on the rack, but it was
in service of driving the damn thing. Debian was at the time more for
those who liked to work on their computers than for those who drove 'em.
yes this is true. I tried my first linux 1999. I can remember those days.
Even an update or upgrade was a point for the first few releases. But
things changed over time (I'll write below).
This was still the case some years later when after
enduring RPM-based
distros -- Caldera (yes!), Red Hat (4.2, then the ghastly 5.0), and SuSE
(who knows) -- but now Ubuntu offered a DEB-based distro that was also
relatively easy to install and configure. I wish I'd swallowed hard and
switched to Debian then, taken my lumps then instead of now. But then as
now, my computers are tools, the means to my ends. And then (less so now,
I think), Debian was a kind of walled garden, as this Ubuntu spinoff is
apparently. (Of course, we were all using KDE or Gnome as we waited for
Rasterman to finish Enlightenment, the pinnacle of desktop achievement or
so we were led to believe and just about impossible to configure.) Debian
also went to some efforts to prevent "non-free" code from running. (They
even banned KDE because of the Qt nonpurity.)
Oh, come on ... Debian has pretty strict and clear policy. That's it. KDE
became anyway useless for many other reasons. This is why people decided to
keep KDE3 as TDE.
If there were an *easy* way to jump to Debian I'd
do it this afternoon.
as mentioned as USB drive costs 10-15US$ or € and you can try it in less
then an hour.
All I'd need is a way to generate a list of the
things have installed,
when you have the usb plugged in with debian on, you can chroot and easily
prepare it to suit you.
then tell Debian to install those. That's where
the Trisquel thing kind of
shines. I think I could jump to it pretty easily, but it wants to bring a
lot of crap along, including vid drivers that just don't work as well as
the OEM ones do. We have heard a lot about "free-as-in-freedom and
free-as-in-beer," but nothing about free as in using one's computer as he
pleases. So we have Ubuntu and the People's Revolutionary Ubuntu
Replacement. What we need is a good recipe to replace Ubuntu, which is
fine but for Canonical's business plan, with Debian, which still breaks
some stuff.
Ubuntu uses Experimental and works as such. Debian stable did not cause any
(I repeat any) issue in the past 10+ years.
We put some effort to make TDE more stable and usable. I remember shortly
after the project started, I had to look into encoding (things different
than ASCII were not working fine). So I put some effort into solving my
problems and the other people helping especially the developers and
maintainer did a heroic work in the past, so that TDE is much better and
more stable.
I can only recommend. As someone mentioned you can just copy the ~/.trinity
directory and have your custom settings.
As for the applications on ubuntu as on debian use
$ dpkg --get-selections
and then --set-selections
It could be you have some package name mismatch, but 99% should work
As to the hive mind -- that must be why Debian is by far the leading Linux
distribution, right?
Well, I don't know. I think a lot of people use also CentOS. I think the
sources are the same and developed over time, so all distros got more
stable and usable. However Debian with its policy is preferable as it gives
more freedom, more packages, homogene environment, easy to understand and
more. I think it is personal choice at the end, but again based on studies
(I'm sure you will find some) there are few major distros and the rest can
hardly cope with them. I think the reason is the man power needed to run
such a project. A lot of distroes disappeared, because they are not
maintainable.
I remember when I started looking into my char encoding problems (it was
perhaps 2011), there were just 4 developers and maintainers incl. the
project leaders (TDE). Now I looked some time ago and it was more then 30
people, some of them working very actively.
I mean look for a distro that is being maintained and is responsive. For
examply if they tell you, you don't need this or that - for me it is no go!
| For me most important is the stability and security and Debian is
| excellent providing it - TDE on top and again - stability. This makes
| the combination excellent for me.
I have no doubt. Getting there is the problem. Which is why I need to keep
looking.
Ahm, don't understand - a usb pen drive - may be old one with 16GB or so and
2 hours time is sufficient.
I for myself even stopped using usb for such exercises - I use virtual box.
You can download and test everything without touching your system, or even
without rebooting it. If it is not good apply the "rm -rf" cure and done.
BR