What is everyone's obsession with Debian and distros based on it? Is there something awesome that only Debian has that I'm missing out on?
Personally I think that Slackware is better than Debian and I was a full time Debian user from v2.2 - v7.6.
After using a bunch of different distros, I have to say they all suck in one way or another. There are some glaring issues that will piss you off, considering how long Linux has been around. it doesn't surprise me that people find it hard to move from Windows to Linux, on Windows things work, on Linux it might work. The biggest problem is the fragmentation, which Torvalds likes for the silly reason that forking can create better products eventually, and the community is a cesspool. For example all Linux is the same, they have a common source the kernel, but you have extreme secularism for one distro over another. If you look at Android (which is a forked Linux), the only reason it exists is because Google took control of it and never let go. If it had been left to the community you would have 40 forks of it and none of them working properly.
How on Earth is it a fork if its' base is AOSP ? A fork is when you take what they have and go off on your own and make it your own thing. Like Blink is a fork of Webkit. edit: The funny thing is if you use the same thinking then Ubuntu isn't Linux
Just wasted 4 hours trying to get Debian installed properly. There were problems everywhere one after the other. First it demanded I find and download a wifi driver, despite the live cd containing all the non-free drivers already. Then the ethernet disappeared without a trace after the installation finished. Thinking that if the live cd installation phase had ethernet working, there must be an easy solution to get it working after installation, I searched online only to find others experiencing the same problem but never finding a solution. Sudo command did not work, had to create a sudo access manually. The final straw was when reboot does not work, it suspends the computer instead. Things just do not work in Linux most of the time.
Debian isn't a good beginner's distribution. I would stuck with Ubuntu or openSUSE. Fedora also is a great distro but the learning curve is a bit higher than with SUSE, and the support period is only 13 months as it's a developer-oriented OS.
Dont do it. Debian is like an unpolished rock. It needs to be polished before You can use it as home desktop os. Go for Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu MATE LTS, Kubuntu 14.04.3 LTS or OpenSUSE. No other Linux distros to consider. Just these so You can have an out of the box experience with "almost" everything "working". Ps.: understand that "working" doesnt mean working like it works on windows. Just mean "working". That You will experience on Linux, no matter what distro you use. Everytime you will have some problem, some driver, some bug making the os not working properly. Thats the price you paid for open source..
You can install the same distro of ANY Linux four times, pressing the same options on the same computer, and it will come up completely different each time. Plus, it will take hours, and hours to install. Then, if you are lucky, you will boot to a desktop. Many times you will just get a command prompt, then you will spend hours, and hours trying to fix it. Finally you will stick in a Windows boot media, and be up and running in 20 minutes.
Sounds like hyperbole. How is it that I have never had any of these issues, on multiple systems? How about the tens of millions of other Linux users without any of these problems? It must be magic...or just plain down to competence.
Rub off effect of rise and consequent fall, rather decline, of Ubuntu, I guess! Obsession are seldom reason based. Spanning over 13 years of Linux use, I can say one thing for sure that when things go bad, they go really, really bad for Linux users. You are pretty much always left fending for yourself. Although with internet coming out of age(increased number of forums and Linux users), things have become far more easier. But still when you are stuck and nothing seems to work, the usual suggestions to fix that are: try a different distro! My earlier 8 years of Linux usage were primarily RPM-based, viz, RedHat 4, RedHat 8, Fedora Core 4, RHEL 4, and lastly CentOS. After getting sick of circular dependencies, I moved to Ubuntu Server, which somehow seemed to work more often than not for me. Personally, I abhor Ubuntu Desktop, but I do have to acknowledge that it made Linux popular as a Desktop OS. With Windows, an OS built for masses, and actually used by masses; you can always rest assured that someone somewhere shares your misery, suffering from whatever that ails your PC, and that there would be a fix, or a service pack. Even when you are a pirate, you can throw tantrums about MS not treating "its customers" right. Someone somewhere will always be there with you to drum up your concerns. Good luck doing that with Linux. Really, Good Luck! With Windows 10, though, I feel that notion of RTM/GA (and the "stable" releases thereafter such as SPs in case of XP/W7), that once were much cherished as the holy grail of stability have been completely sidelined. Yes, programs/OS are bound to have bugs, but somehow abdicating that "solemn" responsibility of at least attempting to deliver a stable product by saying that version'ing would cease to exit and would be constantly upgraded; just doesn't feel right to me. But given the options to choose from either a patch with ETA of very soon or a patch, as part of XP/W7 SP or W8 to W8.1 upgrade, with ETA of, well, not very soon, who in their right mind wouldn't choose that constant upgrade option, even if there is an increased probability of introducing another bug, right? Finally, privacy concerns with W10, which I presume is the only reason we are actually discussing whether one should shift to Linux here. Whether we(royal I) like it or not, big data is the future and is going stay here for a while. So, whatever that you might consider as personal - whether google/FB search on your ex or your pics with your dog - aren't something that can't be traced back to you. Point here is not that some piece of software is collecting/sending personal info *without* your approval. Well, I don't know if I can actually explicitly state what the point is in a fit-all kinda sentence. Threshold of acceptable breach of privacy for different people is different. Be that as it may, if someone, be it MS or NSA or PI, were hellbent on snooping on you, you can't actually stop them. Although, you can always make it difficult for them to create an uniquely identifiable profile on you. Take a hint, wink, wink. What really fascinates me is the question: Why is MS collecting these data? If it were Google, I'd understand. If it were SNS such Facebook, I'd understand. If it were eCom biz, I'd understand. But with Microsoft, what's the motive? So, to sum up, I've made my peace with it a long time back. And, I'm running Windows 10 Enterprise now on desktop.
distro this or distro that, as a total newbie in linux i know nothing about them. i decided to walk away from my very fast and totally troublefree windows 7 pc because of the continuing spying practices of ms. even though i paid for w7.. so i bought a lenovo lappy with a dead battery and hd. that was 20 euros, plus 48 euros for a new 500 gb hd. plus zero euro for a mint cd. installation was slow, but otherwise troublefree. and everything works. now, it runs fast enough, for some internetting. otherwise it is a bit of pain, you have no drive letters, etc. what it really needs is a cmd.exe for linux.. [ i installed midnight commander on it, it was like a homecoming to my dosdays, and the norton commander, everything familiar, including the keys.just no doscommands.] but i have resisted the temptation to put wine on it, or social media garbage, etc. so i will make my surfing a little more private now, from this thinghy.. i can always use my windows pc for heavier tasks. [ after i pulled the wifi out of its usb socket.] and mb learn to live with linux mint along the way. but everything ms will remain offline for me. and i find that linux mint works fine online..
I've tried 4 Linux OS now, Mint, Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Debian. The only ones that install with no problems are Mint and Ubuntu. Granted the video driver installed is generic nouveau without hardware acceleration, it works well enough for browsing, and the driver can be upgraded after to proprietary. The stock software, Firefox and LibreOffice, were perfect. Elementary OS tried to be too fancy, the interface was laggy. Typing 1 letter at a time had half second noticeable lag between presses. The stock software were rubbish. Debian I tried because someone a few pages ago convinced me had better security and stability than derivatives Mint and Ubuntu. Many distros are based and rely on Debian, if anything bad was in Debian it would be noticed immediately and fixed. That was the theory. My experience is the newest Debian released 5 days ago is buggy as hell, wired ethernet did not work after install, and reboot option did not work. You would think if the derivatives Mint and Ubuntu got it right, Debian should too. Debian did get the proprietary video driver installed by default, that was it's only redeeming feature. The spyware packages in Linux are "zeitgeist" and "geoclue". Ubuntu had them both enabled. Debian, I thought should not, nobody warned me of Debian spying. But I was surprised to find Debian had these two spy packages fully enabled too. Mint had geoclue but not zeitgeist installed, I must give it credit for actively removing zeitgeist from the Debian default. In my opinion Mint has the best privacy and can be trusted, for having zeitgeist removed by default.
ok. I just installed (again, and clean install) ubuntu linux 15.04 x64 on my secondary partition to see how things are going this time. * did the ubuntu update, rebooted; * selected the catalyst amd driver, rebooted; * selected amd processor driver, rebooted; * instaled brug customizer to edit my grub entries in a less pain way, edited everything I wanted, rebooted; * did some edits on default unity behavior, rebooted; * instaled unity editor, did some tweeks, rebooted. All is working "fine". Everything on my computer is working but... thats the thing that always comes up when dealing with linux, the BUT question... "but" the computer did not responde verywell with unity on ubuntu. I see some not responsiveness happening now and then and thats why Im stucked on primary partition running windows 7. the softwares, drivers, etc., are not problems for me, but the system not responding as it supose to do is not good for my daily usage of my machine. as I said before, all is running "fine", but not as it suppose to run on my actual hardware. too sad (again). lets hope for ubuntu linux 15.10 to see if things get solved and unity can have a better behavior. before anyone says, no: Ill not gor for kde, mate or gnome. I love KDE and I apretiate MATE folks work on bringing us the old days to the future, but Im going consider the simple user aproach. I want to download the iso, burn it or turn it into a usb bootable devide, install and see things working as it supose to work. on mate Ill have problems with glitches on desktop behaviors and font configurations (if I change the default ones); on kde Ill be with high resources usage (kde is the best, indeed, but not what I need); In Gnome Ill be in a worst position as amd drivers has lots of problems with its desktop. whats left is xfce and unity only. xfce lacks a lot of things I need to have on an operating system and unity is not running so well on my machine. thats whats linux is all about... and thats why I cant migrate to it for good..