Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server.
Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk!
I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I’m lazy. Fedora was the only ‘just works’ option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn’t actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn’t get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘just worked’ in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don’t plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.
I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan…but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it’s physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let’s say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don’t have answers to these. I’m saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what’s software, what’s firmware and what’s hardware.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there’s Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I’m lazy. Fedora was the only ‘just works’ option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn’t actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn’t get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘just worked’ in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don’t plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Raspberry Pi OS has the same advantage as macOS - both OSes are meant to be run on specific hardware, so everything should just work. ;)
Since you’ve been playing with RPi, have you tried Alpine Linux?
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan…but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.
Firmware is software.
Debatable.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it’s physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let’s say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don’t have answers to these. I’m saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what’s software, what’s firmware and what’s hardware.
Fair point…but it seems the Debian stuff being included in their images is all software.
Hey Zucca, I’ve not been around fgo much since around the time otw vanished but remember you from there and I’m still a happy portage user.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there’s Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
What’s the problem?
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don’t know much about KDE at all.