Debian aims for rock solid stability
To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).
So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”
A lot of people don’t know this though. They think it is the “won’t fall over” type. They hear “use debian over ubuntu, because it’s more stable” or “use debian for servers, because it’s more stable” and think it means “You want uptime, so you dont want something crashing”. So when they see a bug, it is concerning to them. A distro focused on not falling over must super care about reducing crashes, and don’t realize the exact opposite is actually true. The bug was fixed a long time ago, but you don’t get it because “don’t change” is more important than “don’t crash”.
If the bug is in a popular package (ie, a super common screensaver) in a very popular distro (and a lot of people have chosen the distro because they think it has less bugs than others), I can imagine the maintainer getting fed up with the bug reports for a bug that was already fixed.
Most people I’ve seen on Lemmy understands that “stable” means “unchanging”… But every person I’ve talked to outside of lemmy, thinks it means “less bugs”. So clearly it’s a very big misunderstanding (Which is basically confirmed by the fact that xscreensaver gets so many invalid bug reports that they felt necessary to do this.)
If you received constant complaints from users about bugs that you had resolved years ago, but package maintainers refused to package, you’d probably get sick of it too.
Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has blog posts about how everyone in the world uses curl, and as a result include the curl license in their readme, which means he gets mail from people upset about their car not working.
Steam had a big thing recently because the snap of Steam is not official. But yet, they get a TON of bug reports for things that are only broken in the snap.
I imagine having the same conversation of “That bug is already fixed as of 8 months ago” “Well how do I install the latest release?” “I dunno, talk to your distro about that” on a super regular basis, it starts being something that is incredibly infuriating. No one wants to take the anger of aggressive upset people, especially when the fault lies with someone else. He has asked Debian to stop shipping out of date versions of his software in the past. But because open source, they are not obligated to, so he has very limited ways to protect his own interests.
Your issue sounds like it’s with Debian for shipping incredibly out of date software and putting jwz into this position in the first place and not with jwz.
This is a daily reminder that “stable” means “unchanging” and in no way refers to the quality of the code. It doesn’t mean “won’t fall over”… That’s a different type of stable which debian stable absolutely does not guarantee.
A bug in debian will remain present in debian until the next update a year from now. If the bug breaks your workflow, then find a new workflow or a new distro.
I didn’t realize that. I use a .xyz for a lot of my personal stuff and didn’t realize this. I wanted basically .website … i didnt want .com or .org or anything with tld that meant something, so xyz felt nice. Also, the domain I wanted with any popular tld was insanely expensive and i got my xyz for cheap when it was brand new (not for 1 dollar though).
Maybe I need to look into new domains, but I probably will just stick with it since its primarily for personal use anyway.
Caveat: This is all written assuming the message is being written on a computer with a real keyboard. But if we’re assuming this is written on a phone, then my analysis doesn’t apply, but then again, writing a java program to execute in your messaging app is also a terrible idea. Which means we’re suspending disbelief, so I choose to believe that a computer keyboard and shortcuts are available.
Type the phrase once. Select all. copy, paste, paste (the first paste replaces what you already have highlighted, the second paste adds a second copy). Now you have 2. Control + A, Control + C, Control + V… Now you have 4.
It will take you only 7 cycles of this get 128*, you only need to copy/paste it one by one if you want to send each message separately. and even then, it’s would purely be copy the original, then paste, send, paste, send, paste send, paste, send.
Assuming you can hold down control and just hit ACVV 7 times, that’s 28 keystrokes. I’d bet I can get that done in 5 seconds or less (i tried it, it’s less than that), so now I only save 5 seconds. Which means I only get 25 seconds to write the script. Which he chose to write in java for some reason?
[print("I'm sorry") for x in range(0, 100)] is actually a script I could write in less than 25 seconds.
*And I disagree with the “reason 4” given. She didn’t say “exactly 100 times” she said “100 times before I forgive you” and to me, “before” implies = and not ==. So if you drop it in 128 times, that exceeds the criteria. No one has ever rescinded forgiveness for receiving extra apologies.
I switched to FreshRSS which works just as well, and doesn’t have a toxic dev
Its always so disappointing when Manjaro is the recommended distro for things.
Saying GNU/Linux does not give that message to 99% of people though. If I say that the SteamDeck actually runs on GNU/Linux to a normie gamer, they are more likely to be like “ok, that sounds confusing I’ll stick to xbox”. And anyone within the community already gets it. We all know the meme, we all get it. Semantics goes both ways. Sometimes you win hearts and minds, and sometimes you just annoy people who don’t care.
And in the name of semantics, “attribution” and “credit” are not the same. I’m obligated to say IceWeasel, or as I’ve taken to calling it, “The libre Firefox fork known as IceWeasel”… It’s important to call it by the full name every time, because Firefox is really the basis of 99.9% of the code in the repo. The repo gives full attribution to firefox and mozilla, but when we refer to it, we never actually give credit to the original.
And since we don’t need to call out the original if we fork something, if I fork GNU-utils and call it linux-OS-utils. And then build on my own distro, would that be a fully Linux OS? Even though its functionally and codewise identical to a “GNU/Linux” distro?
Debian is currently on neovim version 0.4.4 (august 7, 2020). Arch is on 0.9.1(may 29, 2023) (current). That’s just an example off the top of my head.
If you use a server exclusively for serving content and never modify configs on your server… php current version is 7.4 (past EOL since Nov 2022)…
Oh wait, I’m only on Debian 11, though its supported until at least 2024. I have “support” but its for old versions of software. I sometimes can’t even share a tmux config between my desktop and my server, because the versions are so different.
I have had similar issues with debian dist-upgrades just like I have with ubuntu. Turns out jumping from neovim 0.4.4 to 0.9.1 (jk, debian sid STILL only has 0.7.2) is the kind of version jump that goes straight past a deprecation warning in 0.5 and actual deprecation in 0.6, and now my config doesn’t work. So the options are “always be perpetually just a bit out of date because we cant actually update to new software”, or “risk breaking things by having large version leaps, from the woefully outdated to the pretty new”
So the solution to needing newer server software versions: run things in docker… Which they package version 20.10 in the “docker.io” package. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling from the docker official source to get docker-ce gets us up to 24.0.5, which is the same version as arch. So it’s possible to get there, just not out of the box. And by the time you start adding ppa’s to your distro, things stop being as stable.
tl;dr - If you need up to date software, debian is awful. It is rock solid, but often obsolete.
I use it for my server with the docker workarounds, but needing to do workarounds make it less fun. If I had to start over, I might pick something else like NixOS. I dunno. For “not going to crash” levels of stability, I can’t explicitly name anything better, but for “actually functions how i want it to” it’s definitely not at the top.
Indeed. “Linux” now means “literally Linux, the kernel” and also “an operating system that uses Linux as the kernel”. Kind of like how people say they use “Windows” but they mean that they use “Windows 11”.
The only reason saying “GNU/Linux” helps is if you want to give credit to GNU. It doesn’t add clarity to anything. Which is warranted, but also, what if I forked GNU and relabeled it as linux-tools. I believe that’s within my right, isn’t it? To fork and copy things.
It’s kinda odd to be like “copyright is bad, the works should be free, and just pass around naturally!” … “but also make sure I get credit”
Awesome! Latest main works with no modifications needed now!
I’ve actually had a few times recently where I really wanted a color picker and just shrugged it off assuming it would be a hassle, or inconvenient to use. So thanks a ton for sharing.
I’m very unfamiliar with QT (and thus the python QT lib)…
But I had to change QTimer to import from QtCore, and Qpainter from QtGui for my local PyQT5 (from Arch repos).
This looks/works great but now I’m just a bit curious about why classes are in different places in different versions of pyqt5
The issue is that no one is taking my words out of context to get offended. No one is getting offended because I said things. They are getting offended because of their own situation, that I just happened to have brought up. If someone in the military had PTSD because someone yelled “Duck!” and then a grenade blew up right near them, so now they have panic attacks anytime they hear someone loudly say duck. That isn’t them “taking the word duck out of context” that is “the word duck affects their brain differently.” No one is saying that using the word master makes you a mean malicious person. No one is accusing you of being on the attack trying to hurt people when you use a word without realizing how it impacts others. If a military vet was like “hey I have severe anxiety when someone says duck, can we say ‘leave early’ instead of ‘duck out early’”. I would be like “oh shit, i didnt realize. my bad, yeah, of course” not “YOURE TAKING MY WORDS OUT OF CONTEXT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THOSE WORDS”. If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you’re on the attack because clearly you don’t care that you are hurting people.
It’s pretty easy to tell a good faith argument most of the time. You don’t need to just blindly accept the opinion of all people. “Hey this word is heavily associated with slavery and makes people think of slavery” is pretty striaghtforward. Thats not a purely bad faith argument.
I don’t know all who you think is “insisting” on the “master/main” change. Everyone I’ve talked to has been like “yeah, if we could that’s cool.” or likened it to more of a “its like if someone reminded you daily of that time you accidentally called the teacher ‘mom’ … having it go away would be nice, but if it doesn’t oh well.” No one is crying over it or making demands. The only “insisting” is just people questioning why the slight suggestion results in so much pushback.
It seems like your only reason to not change is “because someone asked me to and I’m too stubborn and reject any decision that wasn’t my own.” At least “changing a branch name on the worlds largest repo has consequences” is a valid reason. But “I refuse to listen to others”… cmon.
gnewsense was one of those hardline GNU FSF type things. Its old and no longer around. This is a perfectly valid list for a meme from 10 years ago. The selection of distros isn’t odd, using a meme from 10 years ago is odd.
Which distros has no one heard of? some of the are discontinued, so the meme is old (which probably explains the old Fedora logo). And its probably small because this was a preview image from another meme site instead of the full size image. But otherwise the only thing that stands out to me is that backtrack/kali is definitely NOT neo. kali is what you use when you THINK youre a hacker when youre 14. “Im 14 and my linux distro is edgy” vibes. It should have the Mint photo of the kid.
I don’t know the history of who started the master/main debate. if it was a bunch of white people trying to show how progressive they were while black programmers were like “yeah, we don’t care”, then it’s virtue signaling. If it was the black programmers being like “this phrase feels weird to us… can we change it?” … then it’s not virtue signalling, it’s listening to underrepresented voices. I legitimately don’t know which scenario it is. I’m also not in a position where the word bothers me at all, but I also have an easy life, and if someone tells me a word used in a certain way feels weird and I can resolve that with 0 effort (ie, switch new projects to main), I will.
And of course about the retroactive changing, which is why I said I wouldn’t expect linux to change.
Thats not the only definition though. It’s clearly the intended one, but it’s possible to make someone think of other definitions when a word pops up.
And it’s not too hard to go “Oh, I get why alternate definitions might make people uncomfortable, even if I have no issue with it.” And if you can see why someone might be uncomfortable in a situation, and it’s zero effort to avoid that situation… why not?
Unless you’re intentionally trying to not understand, or lack empathy and genuinely can’t understand why words with alternate definitions heavily linked to slavery might make people uncomfortable, it feels pretty self explanatory.
I’ll give Linus a pass, because linux kernel is probably the most widely accessed repo out there, and changing defaults and standards can have an actual impact on third party tooling.
You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.
It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”