My first Linux distribution (back in '97) was Red Hat. When Red Has was
discontinued, I didn't trust Fedora to be a worthy successor
(a judgment which I now believe, in retrospect, was probably wrong):
so I switched, with some reluctance,
to Debian. At first it was a nightmare, but, after a time, I
accustomed myself to the Debian way of doing things and I came to see
some merit to it: Debian has a number of goodies, such as
make-kpkg or debmirror, which I really like
and which provide for a very nice overall integration of customized
elements in the overall distribution.
But now I am becoming increasingly irritated at some of Debian's major defects and I am seriously contemplating switching to another distribution.
The worst offender is probably Debian's slowness at producing
stable distributions. Basically, when using Debian, you
have the choice between three releases: stable,
testing and unstable. Now
stable is hopelessly out-of-date: it works (more or less)
and it is regularly maintained as far as security problems go, but the
libraries and utilities are so incredibly old that you can't install
any recent program on it—you're stuck with the set of programs
you start with. I use stable on my computers which
absolutely must not break: a router in my parents' house and my Web
server (regulus.⁂.net), and even then it causes
some problem (I needed Git, for
example, and it was nearly impossible to install). The
unstable Debian distribution, on the other hand, is
bleeding-edge and, consequently, always broken: packages are uploaded
to unstable as soon as they are build, essentially
without any testing. Not a good idea! So it might seem that
testing, which (confusingly) is intermediate between
stable and unstable, is a reasonable
compromise. Not so! This is what I use on most of my computers, but
Debian has a religious rule that packages for the testing
distribution can never be build directly for it, they must come from
unstable after a certain period of testing in the latter.
Sounds reasonable? Actually it isn't: it means that even if there is
a serious security vulnerability, the problem cannot be fixed in
testing until it has been fixed in unstable,
tested there, and all the dependencies for the new package migrated to
testing—so testing is a security
nightmare. Sometimes, also, packages unexplainably vanish; a week
ago, for example, a very serious security
problem was found in the (proprietary) nVidia graphics drivers
for Unix—now nVidia reacted reasonably fast and corrected
the problem within 72 hours, but Debian reacted in its usual stupid
way: presently the
package has simply disappeared from the testing
distribution. This is worse than just bad management! Debian is
supposed to have some security maintenance, but
it's only for the stable distribution despite an announcement
sometime ago that they would do something about testing.
The
FAQ confirms this massive stupidity.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, however. The basic problem
about Debian developers is that they are like religious fanatics: they
have incredibly strict rules about everything and they refuse to
ignore the rules even when it has utterly stupid consequences (such as
removing vital parts of the distribution or of the documentation on
the account that it is not free software
for some rigid
definition of the term which no sensible person gives a shit about).
Strict rules can be a good thing in a computer context when it means
we can rely on certain invariants, but when taken at a too high level
it only causes problems. The Debian
legal team, furthermore, is a bunch of sick weirdos who confuse
real-life law with a game of Nomic and therefore
can't understand that sometimes the only valid solution to a
(purely theoretical) legal problem is ignore it
.
Another consequence of how anal Debian is about legal problems is that
there isn't a single multimedia package of any kind in the
distribution: you need to get those from another source which,
being maintained by a very small team, doesn't benefit from the
general Debian infrastructure and has all sorts of problems.
So I wonder what other Linux distribution I could use instead. The
best candidate so far seems to be Ubuntu, which seems to benefit from
many of Debian's strengths withouth being driven by ayatollahs (in
fact, its motto is: Linux for human beings
). Gentoo or Fedora might also be worthy of
consideration, however.