I used to use debian. But their bureaucratic self righteous organization have -at my own personal- opinion created a drift between them and upstream packages.
Countless decisions of debian maintainers (that are proficient at packaging and NOT at coding) to think of themselves has «smarter» than upstream open source software maintainers have resulted in countless teeth grinding:
- the openSSL randomness «fix» that resulted in openSSH being shipped with only 65535 potential keys
- the complexity of building clean src vs bin packages (in opposition with RPM or slackware packaging) and the numerous kombinat called debian helpers makes packaging a hell,
- latex packages being a tad broken
- ruby/python packages requiring a tad of contorsion to have them work the way they were inteded to work natively (the overzealous package slicing which in python/ruby required you to install non trivial package to use gem/pip)
- the multiplication of packages for «ease of use» that cluttered debian with so many fixed dependencies hell that it makes stable often hard and slow to upgrade vs testing that can break and the hell of version pinpointing
- the bureaucratic approach of splitting configurations in so many directories that it is mind blowing and as usual not always following upstream simpler conventions
- poor default config (like apache cgi-bin being global to help install 3rd party modules)
- and the debian community above all that has taken «the melon» and kind of been evolving to be a tad overconfident leading to impose choices that are more than disputable to the users (such of course as systemd) but let's say that ubuntu having sucked most of their community of maintainer during the split it is even more obvious that they have a «microsoft» syndrome of we know better than you what is good for you (desktop choices...)
As a result, I have almost happily left debian as my main OS, but I still am hating that «securing/hardening» an OS after default install has become the norm in free/open source main distribution.
The more I have seen open source project take a turn of «sectarism» the less I am convinced in the so called intrinsic values of openness in free software.
Yet, there are still enough valuable open source projects out there for my comfort
Countless decisions of debian maintainers (that are proficient at packaging and NOT at coding) to think of themselves has «smarter» than upstream open source software maintainers have resulted in countless teeth grinding:
- the openSSL randomness «fix» that resulted in openSSH being shipped with only 65535 potential keys
- the complexity of building clean src vs bin packages (in opposition with RPM or slackware packaging) and the numerous kombinat called debian helpers makes packaging a hell,
- latex packages being a tad broken
- ruby/python packages requiring a tad of contorsion to have them work the way they were inteded to work natively (the overzealous package slicing which in python/ruby required you to install non trivial package to use gem/pip)
- the multiplication of packages for «ease of use» that cluttered debian with so many fixed dependencies hell that it makes stable often hard and slow to upgrade vs testing that can break and the hell of version pinpointing
- the bureaucratic approach of splitting configurations in so many directories that it is mind blowing and as usual not always following upstream simpler conventions
- poor default config (like apache cgi-bin being global to help install 3rd party modules)
- and the debian community above all that has taken «the melon» and kind of been evolving to be a tad overconfident leading to impose choices that are more than disputable to the users (such of course as systemd) but let's say that ubuntu having sucked most of their community of maintainer during the split it is even more obvious that they have a «microsoft» syndrome of we know better than you what is good for you (desktop choices...)
As a result, I have almost happily left debian as my main OS, but I still am hating that «securing/hardening» an OS after default install has become the norm in free/open source main distribution.
The more I have seen open source project take a turn of «sectarism» the less I am convinced in the so called intrinsic values of openness in free software.
Yet, there are still enough valuable open source projects out there for my comfort