Let me start by saying Debian rolling release is the truth.
That being said, I worry about the archaic community and contributor-tooling behind debian to be a barrier that will lead to its demise though. Makes me sad, but it is what it is. We are all getting old, and to us this interface looks normal, but to new people and those making the apps that the kids depend on, it looks like a shitshow of antiquated code.
Nobody wants to interact with savannah, it's ugly, move those projects somewhere else.
Nobody wants to use mailing lists or byzantine social arrangements through IRC just to get their package submitted.
I've got to be real with you, not a lot of people give a shit about 'free' beyond price either. Make non-free the default and put 'free-only' as the apt option. I love free software and it hurts me to say it, but there's a reason why AUR is killing the game right now. It's easy to use, easy to enter, easy to see people using your code in a mainstream OS without having to opine to holy neckbeards for the mercy to allow your package to be published.
Debian is a great OS, and I'd happily use it for the rest of my life if given the choice, but reality is staring me in the face that this won't last in its current form, and its current form won't be maintained if anything changes. It's a catch-22.
Debian has hidden appeal. Distribution tooling languages center around the era the they started out, it takes a group of mixed generations to do slow reform. If you worry you can get involved
Debs are very easy to make and their structure is easy to understand for anyone who's been using Linux for at least a couple months. They're just tarballs with a couple special text files. What's hard is Debian's official tools to make debs, which are geared towards people who want to become maintainers of packages in official Debian repos. If you don't aim to become one, there are third-party tools which make it easy, such as cargo-deb or holo-build. If you don't want to use them, you may also even write a shell script which will produce a good package. Just use lintian to double-check whether everything is alright.
RPM on the other hand is an over-engineered mess: <https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/argh-pm.html>. Tangentially, YUM and DNF were the slowest package managers I've ever used. They're a real pain.
> RPM on the other hand is an over-engineered mess: <https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/argh-pm.html>. Tangentially, YUM and DNF were the slowest package managers I've ever used. They're a real pain.
I like OpenSuse but man zypper is possibly the slowest package manager ever!! Can't even download in parallel. I think they are now moving to dnf.
Making the package generally isn't very difficult in comparison to flatpak, appimage, rpm. The problem is the old dusty path to getting a mentor/sponsor for your little insignificant utility to get introduced into the repos. Every doc/page you see will have swaths of (sometimes old) information that outlines endless procedure and arcane incantations required to find someone who may be online and not idle, who might just vouch for you... or they might endlessly critique your code and license.
This whole process worked great back in the day, but now the kids will just go somewhere else or release outside of repositories.
I know Ubuntu loves the smell of their own codes, but part of me thinks PPA was Canonical's way to address how difficult and crusty the process to get software into Debian is. To this day if you can get in Debian repos, Ubuntu will include you in theirs 'for free'.
I feel so bad saying this.. Debian was supposed to be The One, imo. I've been at this linux thing since the mid 90s, I could not have predicted the current state of things decades ago. It truly disappoints me that things have gone this wrong with modern Linux, but I can't say it had a chance to play out any other way. You see the same with cryptocurrency (gasp!) where in order to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the opposition a novel industry sought to emulate the legacy systems enough to be familiar and charm the opposing users, but ended up gaining users sold on that dream who lo and behold demanded an effigy to their old systems. We brought this on ourselves.
Now we have Ubuntu aiming to be the new Microsoft at an org level, aesthetically emulating MacOS at a UI level, and meanwhile pretending to be a crossplatform user experience perfect for phone and desktop. I call bullshit. Ubuntu took the dark path after 10.04 and 10.10 when Ubuntu Netbook Remix first reared its ugly head. Someone misunderstood the instructions, fed it after midnight, and now it's achieved its final form- Unity.
This is 100% our fault, my generations fault. We didn't keep with the times and I don't see that changing fast enough.
No, the recent change [0] was to add non-free firmware to the official installer (instead of relegating it to a separate unofficial installer). GP, however, was talking about the apt repository: the non-free apt repository is disabled by default. This hasn't changed and is unlikely to ever change. The non-free apt repository be enabled via a trivial /etc/apt/sources.list edit.
So that means you can end up installing some non-free firmware, potentially buggy/broken, and get zero updates for it without manual intervention? I don't think I would have expected that. Is it such a leap to now also enable the non-free repo by default? Seems like an inconsistent position to an outsider (user).
> So that means you can end up installing some non-free firmware, potentially buggy/broken, and get zero updates for it without manual intervention?
The alternative is that they don't install any firmware, your installation is broken or crippled, on another computer you search desperately for the correct firmware, which when you find it (on some byzantine and bitrotted manufacturers' website) has some impenetrable process that only works on Windows to install, is often buggy and broken, and there's never been an official update. If you need to manually intervene you might as well reinstall the OS because you didn't take any notes on how you did it last time, the manufacturers website has disappeared, and you're downloading the updated driver that might fix the bug from all-the-drivers.disco or a Discord server run by H4r&dw3r3-wiz4r&d88 who was probably not born in 1988.
For me, there's a huge leap from installing drivers that you're necessarily going to install anyway (because you're installing on the box that has the hardware) to adding optional stuff in. As long as it doesn't install the drivers silently, but installs them loudly. I'd love to even see a EULA pop up that indemnifies Debian from problems stemming from the nonfree drivers, to provide the appropriate level of intimidation and aversion. I would also request exclamation points, possibly a bright red or yellow color, maybe a blink.
I wouldn't be entirely against exclamation points, bright red or yellow, and blinking, for enabling nonfree repos, but there isn't exactly a high bar to jump over currently. The bar seems exactly high enough to keep everybody from complaining for very long.
The alternative I was hoping for was a non-free (firmware only?) repo was enabled by default to support the non-free software that was installed by default.
The alternative to not install required non-free firmware is not an option we need to go back to.
