"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software."
I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.
Debian is ideologically opposed to things like closed source drivers that ubuntu makes easy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just makes it not a good choice for casual users and especially gamers.
Not that I'm saying that Debian is a better choice than Ubuntu here – Debian stable is Debian stable, and Ubuntu often contains stuff still considered experimental on Debian side – but unlike with, say, Fedora, many non-free drivers are included in the official repositories.
I'm not sure if Ubuntu made Debian much better than it is. Sure, there are some contributions, but they usually go other way around - Debian benefits Ubuntu.
Especially with latest developments of Ubuntu moving away from the rest of the Linux world (Mir, Unity and etc.). I.e. all the Ubuntu specific things aren't benefiting the rest, only Ubuntu.
As somebody who has the family using debian for decades now, I am very averse to trying out a new daily driver. Of course if it really is better and not just a different way of going about things, it is worth a try. But this comment gives me no real information, just an opinionated take without pointing to anything specific other than I might need to use apt, which I like. The hardware, software, peripheral comments seem odd or at least about seven years out of date, since I rarely have trouble with any of that and many vendors focus on publishing Debian compatible drivers / software as their only Linux contrib, so they actually get things before other distros in many instances.
They don't have a principled stance from a GNU point of view. Debian installation media includes non-free software [1]. The killer feature of Ubuntu and its derivatives was always built-in support for proprietary codecs and drivers that actual regular people aside from Richard Stallman expect to work.
I would love for my vendors to support Debian but they won’t. Hell, it was hard enough to get them to update their systems to RHEL7 much less move to a totally different distro.
Debian supports a huge number of architectures, not just the 386 that comes in most desktop computers. Not all modern computing devices have the power of Intel Core 2 processors.
The other thing is, if people want a sweet enduser experience, they're not going to install the default Debian install anyways. They'll use an enduser-focused distro like Ubuntu.
Debian is extremely opinionated. I swore them off after they made it extremely difficult for many years to install Firefox because of some ideological purity bullshit.
Debian has abysmal hardware support( well gpus mostly). They need to do something about their kernels, my RX5700XT is miles ahead with the current kernel compared to whatever debian 10 ships.
- 3rd-party software is not welcome; there is no mechanism for installing it securely because you are supposed to either install software from official repository or compile what you have written yourself. For example, if you want to install Sublime Text, or VS Code, there is no way to do it securely, without giving untrusted software access to your browser history and SSH keys. Of course, you can ignore security and run sudo curl http://script , but it doesn't guarantee that the installer won't break something. It is like we are back in 95 when every second program would replace system DLLs in Windows folder and break other software.
- there are third-party repositories, but they can cause conflicts and you better not use them, but there is no other way to install third-party software.
Third-party software is very important, I install OS to run it, and it surpises me that Linux is so unfriendly to third-party software, including closed-source software and doesn't provide means to install and run it securely and reliably and without making developers adapt it to every existing distribution.
- their bugtracker is email-based and as I don't use email it is completely alien to me. But maybe this is not bad because it stops most of people from posting bugs and saves time to reply to them.
I also tried Fedora, and here is what I don't like:
- they release a new version every 6 or 12 months and it is incompatible with older version, and you have to use a very weird way to upgrade: first, you need to install non-standard plugin (dnf-plugin-system-upgrade), then you need to download packages, then reboot into a temporary OS, then if everything is ok, it will create a new OS, and reboot into it. It looks complicated, easy to break and probably requires a lot of disk space, while Debian can upgrade everything in place.
- if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records nor crash dumps and you will never figure out why it has crashed
Also, APT is buggy when dealing with mixed 32-bit/64-bit packages: I wanted to install a package once and it suggested to delete half of the system to do it; luckily I have noticed that the package list is too long before agreeing. Why would package manager delete packages when I ask to install something, I don't understand. As a bugtracker requires using email, I didn't report it, and it would be difficult to reproduce this anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/paxj85/why_debian_w...
"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software."
I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.
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