Writing this from my Debian system, it's a great distro that has been excellent to me as a daily driver. I switched to Debian 6 after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front. I like the stable/testing package streams, which make it easy to choose old but rock-stable vs just a bit old and almost as stable.
And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.
madars · 27m ago
>I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.
Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.
bayindirh · 20m ago
Which GPU, display server and compositor stack are you using?
madars · 11m ago
Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only displaying a console should not result in kernel panics under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-style "frankenkernel" now.
bayindirh · 7m ago
Intel's integrated GPU driver team, actually all driver teams, had a period of frequent screw-ups a while back (five years ago? Time flies). They also borked e1000e driver in the same period.
On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None of them created any problems for a very, very long time. To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU systems crashed.
...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf files without using man, heh. :)
Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
djfobbz · 8m ago
Yeah, I ditched Ubuntu Server after too many upgrade headaches. I manage 75+ VPS instances for app hosting, and it's nerve-wracking doing maintenance updates knowing there's a chance one won't boot after. That's easily an extra 1-2 hours per VPS just to get it back. Switched to Debian back in the 8.x days in 2015 and it's been smooth sailing. Never had it break unless I was the one who messed it up.
zvmaz · 1h ago
> after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
In what way Ubuntu went downhill?
ACS_Solver · 28m ago
For me, it was a combination of Ubuntu breaking upstream and introducing its own unnecessary systems.
I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream.
The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir.
My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile.
Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.
doublepg23 · 29m ago
I forget the exact context but I recall an Ubuntu dev stating they have more users of the Firefox snap alone than trendy distros have entire users.
I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.
bayindirh · 16m ago
Well, I don't know which trendy distro the dev is referring, but Debian is complete opposite of Trendy. It's a bedrock distro silently running almost everywhere in some form or shape.
Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded) appliances are built upon Debian, for example.
P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra do not collect such information. You can install "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no" during installation, so most people do not send in package selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap installations.
happymellon · 1h ago
Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.
Santosh83 · 51m ago
As I understand it, snap the package format is not proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they patch their version of snap to only use that store. It'd be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub.
Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".
tannhaeuser · 8m ago
Snaps don't just suck from an ideological but also practical perspective, as described for Thunderbird. Firefox on Ubuntu has also serious permission issues with webcam support OOTB even experts are struggling with (involving AppArmor, pipewire, snap, and FF device config). and has become unusable for things like browser-only MS Teams on mainstream notebooks.
Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an established and already much better organized system like Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another level of indirection.
bayindirh · 46m ago
Did they release the server components for hosting your own snap repositories, yet?
I can't seem to find it. Any pointers would be helpful, so at least I can know the latest state of this thing.
curt15 · 30m ago
Snapd still hardcodes Canonical's snap store signing key and provides no mechanism to add your own keys. Any other snap repos will be treated as second class citizens.
mmcnl · 1h ago
I don't really understand why this is such a big problem. You don't have to use snaps.
npteljes · 53m ago
Defaults matter a lot, and snaps are the default in Ubuntu.
The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is not winning any popularity contests either.
Santosh83 · 46m ago
Snaps per se are no better or worse than flatpak. Canonical's mistake, IMO, was to make their store the only place snaps can be hosted. That is the "proprietary" bit everyone keeps talking about.
But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap that freedom.
bayindirh · 42m ago
Another problem is, Canonical promised to release server components and enable alternative stores, and just forgot that they made that pledge.
Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users.
> But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub
But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning.
Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem.
I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible.
I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
bayindirh · 59m ago
You're right. You don't have to use snaps. Ubuntu migrates packages slowly in behalf of you.
Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You don't have to install it manually.
There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this was the official answer).
yjftsjthsd-h · 1h ago
You really have to work to avoid them; ex. `apt install firefox` will install the snap
LeoPanthera · 59m ago
You sort of do. It's really hard to avoid them, because they've modified "apt" to install snaps by default without asking.
tasuki · 51m ago
I'm with my neighbor comments. How do you use Ubuntu without snaps? The base Ubuntu install already comes with several snaps. Installing random things through apt leads to snaps. I personally do not know how to avoid snaps on Ubuntu.
wkat4242 · 22m ago
Yes you do. Some packages aren't available anymore in apt
superb_dev · 45m ago
If you use Ubuntu, yes you do. It’s why I ditched Ubuntu
nextos · 56m ago
IMHO, it also became too complex, with too many things installed by default and too much upstream patching.
This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.
yjftsjthsd-h · 1h ago
Snaps, and ads in the motd
bayindirh · 54m ago
Plus reduced support duration to increase adoption of Ubuntu Pro. Changing some packages ever slightly so they behave a little differently.
Switch to sudo-rs, uu-coreutils (rust based stuff), etc., etc.
It's not a Debian derivative anymore. It's something else.
Was not my cup of tea before, it's even more not my cup of tea now.
john01dav · 43m ago
Switching to rust-based system software is very different from the clearly profit seeking (or control seeking which is just long term profit seeking) changes like ads and snap (with massive friction to not using snap).
bayindirh · 40m ago
Yes, but I prefer glibc + GNU Coreutils based systems in my installations. They're additional nails on top of the (fatal) ones like snap, Ubuntu Pro and MOTD ads.
Eduard · 57m ago
all the weird proprietary Canonical stuff they try to put into vanilla Debian and have it replace common stuff.
snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw.
It's neverending, and it's always failing.
kev009 · 52m ago
The alternative question to ask is: in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian?
In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack.
As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 47m ago
I've been always a Fedora person, still am. But my PC moved to Proxmox (debian) in 2023. Now a Fedora Atomic sits in a VM running flatpaks and podman containers :D
binwiederhier · 1h ago
Thank you to all the Debian volunteers that make Debian and all its derivatives possible. It's remarkable how many people and businesses have been enabled by your work. Thank you!
On a personal note, Trixie is very exciting for me because my side project, ntfy [1], was packaged [2] and is now included in Trixie. I only learned about the fact that it was included very late in cycle when the package maintainer asked for license clarifications. As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine). I approached the maintainer and just recently added build tags [3] to make it easier to remove Stripe, Firebase and WebPush, so that the next Debian-ized version will not have to contain (so many) awkward patches.
As an "upstream maintainer", I must say it isn't obvious at all why the web app wasn't included. It was clearly removed on purpose [4], but I don't really know what to do to get it into the next Debian release. Doing an "apt install ntfy" is going to be quite disappointing for most if the web app doesn't work. Any help or guidance is very welcome!
> The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.
Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.
baobun · 26m ago
On the web part:
Debian sources need to be sufficient to build. So for npm projects, you usually have a debian-specific package.json each npm dependency (transitively, including devDependencies needed for build) needs to be either be replaced with its equivalent debian package (which may need to also be ported) or vendored (usually less ideal, especially for third-party code). Oh, and enjoy aligning versions for all of that. That's doable but non-trivial work with such a sizable lockfile. If I would guess the maintainer couldn't justify the extra effort and taking on combing through all those packages.
I also think in either case the Debian way woukd probably be to split it out as a complementary ntfy-web package.
heywire · 1h ago
Just wanted to say thanks for ntfy! I use it daily to notify me on events from my home Meshtastic node.
gorgoiler · 2h ago
Congratulations!
Debian has been the stable footing of my Free computing life for three decades. Everything about their approach — from showing me Condorcet, organising stable chaos, moving forward by measured consensus, and basing everything on hard wrought principles — has had an effect on me in some way, from technical to social and back again.
I love this project and the immeasurable impact it has had on the world through their releases and culture.
With all my love, g’o xx
accrual · 1h ago
> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!
OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.
badsectoracula · 48m ago
AFAICT this refers to Debian support, the Linux kernel does support 32bit CPUs though only since the original Pentium (excluding some clones).
NewJazz · 1h ago
Well, isn't there an additional year or so of support for old stable? So beyond 2025.
abhinavk · 1h ago
Buster is supported until June 2028.
NewJazz · 24m ago
Thanks, I assume some of that is sort of extended, asterisked support though?
zozbot234 · 1h ago
Hopefully i386 (or perhaps a new i386-like port with added support for 64-bit time values) can move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure for Debian 14 (forky) or Debian 15 (duke). Debian Ports has a m68k port, so supporting one for i386 shouldn't be a huge problem.
3eb7988a1663 · 58m ago
To what end? Outside of sheer nostalgia if you are running ancient hardware, you probably have a bespoke application which requires that environment. Either you cannot change for hard technical, compliance, or just fear of the unknown. Firewall it from the internet and continue to run whatever release last worked.
I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less horsepower than a raspberry pi or N100.
michaelt · 24m ago
My Linux machine is very modern, but I still need i386 architecture support installed, because Steam requires 32-bit support. And Steam requires 32-bit support so people can play 15-year-old games.
(Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine these days)
progval · 13m ago
So you have an amd64 CPU and Debian's "i386" packages will keep working on it. As per the release notes:
> The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU.
tremon · 10m ago
The i386 architecture hasn't been dropped, it is still available in the archives to support 32-bit applications. The major change is that it's no longer a fully supported architecture, in the sense that there is no longer a 32-bit kernel in the archive (the package linux-image-686 is no more). But most packages are still available in their i386 versions:
It still exists but without any official iso or installer.
If that's all there's to it, you can still use debootstrap, compile a kernel, and point the root parameter to your shiny new install.
If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies.
esaym · 26m ago
Are you confusing "386" with 32bit? 686 is the normal 32bit arch. 386 is something from the 1980's right?
accrual · 6m ago
When distros mention i386 support they often actually refer to i586 or i686, yes.
True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run regular Pentiums today if compiled for it, but SSE2 optimizations requires at least a Pentium 4 or Core CPUs instead.
I play with retro PCs often and found OpenBSD's i386 target stopped supporting real 386 CPUs after the 4.1 release, and dropped support for i486 somewhat recently in 6.8. It now requires at least a Pentium class CPU, i586, though the arch is still referred to as i386 likely because it's a common proxy for "32-bit".
NewJazz · 25m ago
AIUI Debian kept the i386 name for the arch even as their 32 bit requirements evolved.
Note that you probably don't need the DVD ("full") image. Most users should use the "minimal" netinstall CD and download packages at install time.
Pet_Ant · 17m ago
I downloaded both because I intend to seed, but yes, if you have a fast internet connection then minimal is perfect... but if you are on a crappy third-world connection where it might take all day to get the image, it's nice to have it all in place when you are ready to install.
synack · 26m ago
Agreed, but for laptops it’s nice to keep a copy of the DVD iso on disk and in your apt sources so that you can install stuff offline.
yonatan8070 · 56m ago
A total of seven architectures are officially supported for "trixie":
"trixie"
64-bit PC (amd64),
64-bit ARM (arm64),
ARM EABI (armel),
ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf),
64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el),
64-bit little-endian RISC-V (riscv64),
IBM System z (s390x)
It's good to see RISC-V becoming a first-class citizen, despite the general lack of hardware using it at the moment.
I do wonder, where are PowerPC and IBM System z being used these days? Are there modern Linux systems being deployed with something other than amd64, arm64, and (soon?) riscv64?
kev009 · 47m ago
Both Power and z are many billion dollar businesses each. Banking and other high finance is the stronghold for both. IBM still seems proud of z, Power seems merely tolerated these days which is a shame because it is a nice ISA and the systems are very nice too.
perdomon · 2m ago
How soon can I update my raspberry pi 5 from
Bookworm to Trixie? Does PiOS have to initiate that first?
bbarnett · 1h ago
You can still use sysvinit, I've already tested servers and desktop builds.
There is a weird depends you cannot get around without simultaneously removing and installing in parallel. A Debian bug highlighted the above, with a "-" for systemd-sysv- systemd- as a fix, along with allow remove essential.
After this fix, sysvinit builds with debootstrap were almost identical as to bookworm. This includes for desktops.
As per with bookworm through buster, you'll still need something like this too:
$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd
# this is the only systemd package that is required, so we up its priority first...
Package: libsystemd0
Pin: release trixie
Pin-Priority: 700
# exclude the rest
Package: systemd
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: *systemd*
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:i386
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:amd64
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
egorfine · 26m ago
Wait, sysvinit on debian 13 truly practically works?? as in, one can remove systemd and have a working server OS with sysv init??
sohrob · 6m ago
I love Debian and have a tremendous amount of respect for the people who work on the project. I no longer use Debian, but I think it's vitally important to have an anchor Linux distribution which isn't overly reliant on a for-profit entity and is truly community driven.
bbarnett · 1h ago
For those worrying about the NIC change with systemd, this comes from the release doc:
# example:
udevadm test-builtin net_setup_link /sys/class/net/eno4 2>/dev/null
ID_NET_LINK_FILE=/usr/lib/systemd/network/99-default.link
ID_NET_LINK_FILE_DROPINS=
ID_NET_NAME=eno4 <-- note the NIC name that will happen after reboot
Here's a one-liner, excluding a bond interface and lo. Gives a nice list of pre and post change.
for x in $(cat /etc/network/interfaces | grep auto | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | grep -Ev 'lo|bond0'); do echo -n $x:; udevadm test-builtin net_setup_link /sys/class/net/$x 2>/dev/null | grep NET_NAME| cut -d = -f 2; done
The doc's logic is that after you've upgraded to trixie, and before reboot, you're running enough of systemd to see what it will name interfaces after reboot.
So far I have not had an interface change due to upgrade, so I cannot say that the above does detect it.
juujian · 1h ago
I have been using Debian Trixie for a few months in testing now, I can attest that its a great, stable operating system. Definitely better than Ubuntu in terms of user experience.
Narishma · 46m ago
> Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
What I did is switch to NetBSD.
bayindirh · 58m ago
Debian's signature feature (upgrade from stable to stable under 15 minutes) shines here too.
My first system migrated in less than 10 minutes, incl. package downloads and reboot. It's not a beast either. N100 mini PC connected to a ~50mbps network.
master_crab · 1h ago
Debian 13 trixie includes numerous updated software packages (over 63% of all packages from the previous release)
I’m not familiar with the metric definition they use, but I’d be worried if close to 100% of the packages they included in bookworm hadn’t been updated in the roughly 2 years between releases.
I use Debian for most of my servers, so I’m sure there is a valid explanation of that phrase.
bbarnett · 1h ago
I don't know why you think it would be different. Are you concerned about security updates? That's not part of the metric, as far as I can see.
And even if it was?
If you look at the number of packages in Debian, only a small portion have CVEs. There are nearly 30k package sources, and an output of 60k binary packages.
Yet we only get a few security updates weekly.
Another example? Both trixie and bookworm use the same firefox ESR (extended release) version. Both will get updated when firefox forces everyone to the next ESR.
Beyond that, some packages are docs. Some are 'glue' packages, eg scripts to manage Debian. These may not change between releases.
Lastly, Debian actually maintains an enormous number of upstream orphaned packages. In those cases, the version number is the same (sometimes), but with security updates slapped on if required.
From my perspective, outside of timely and quick security updates, I have zero desire for a lot of churn. Why would I? Churn means work. Churn means changed stability.
We get plenty of fun and churn from kernel, and driver related changes (X, Wayland, audio/nic, etc), and desktop apps. And of course from anything running forward, with scissors, like network connected joy.
baobun · 1h ago
> I’d be worried if close to 100% of the packages they included in bookworm hadn’t been updated in the roughly 2 years between releases.
Code doesn't "go bad" and not everything is affected by ecosystem churn and CVEs.
An established package not having updates for 2y is not in and of itself problematic.
AstroBen · 14m ago
Debian stable is just that - unchanging between major Debian versions. They do however push security updates when necessary, so you're not missing out on those
duskwuff · 27m ago
It's not uncommon for small software packages to go years between updates - either because they're a simple utility that's feature-complete and rarely needs bug fixes, or because they're data files (e.g. packages of icons or fonts) which might not need to change at all.
aborsy · 18m ago
The difference between Debian and Ubuntu is decreasing with each release recently. I was pleasantly surprised that Debian recognized all hardware components in my laptop released one year ago
out of the box.
Hardware support is good and UI is great! It feels snappier than Ubuntu, may be due to lack of snap and fewer services and applications installed by default.
krylon · 43m ago
As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.
Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)
EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.
dschuessler · 38m ago
Out of curiosity, what do you use these netbooks for?
potato-peeler · 1h ago
> The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB)
What does this mean? If all 69k+ packages are installed, it will take up this much space?
toenail · 1h ago
As this also lists lines of code, it sounds more like sources plus packages. Think space that a full mirror (src + generic + arch specific packages) would need.
tremon · 32m ago
Indeed. This is the amount of space that a Debian mirror would need to host all Trixie packages. So it's the compressed packages total size, not the space it would take to have all packages installed simultaneously (which also happens to be impossible, because of package conflicts/alternatives and Debian supporting 7+ different architectures).
imoverclocked · 1h ago
I have used Debian starting sometime around slink. I still type "apt-get ..." and it still works reasonably well. There have definitely been hiccups in upgrades over the last 25+ years but the amount of time/effort dealing with those is almost nothing in comparison to other linux and non-OSS systems I've dealt with over the same span of time. My only regret is not contributing more to the community.
The thing I like most about Debian is that you need to know at least a little about what is going on to use it. For me, it does a good job of following "as simple as possible and no simpler."
kachapopopow · 42m ago
Plasma 6.3 - I can finally ditch kde neon.
ACS_Solver · 2m ago
Not if you want to remain on new Plasma, you can expect Debian to lag several minor versions behind.
I've found it pretty easy though to use some KDE components built from source on top of the standard Debian packages. Build with kdesrc-build, then have those binaries linked to from your ~/bin and you're set. It might get difficult if you want to rebuild some key components like plasmashell itself but I've been using locally built versions of Kate and Konsole without issue.
sheerun · 1h ago
Debian was often the only linux os that worked on old "spacestations" of mine. Great sentiment
sheerun · 1h ago
And I mean Debian 12, not some old version, much more impressive
Venn1 · 1h ago
I have been tracking Trixie on my Resolve workstation for the past couple of months. The only hiccup was that the latest kernel did not support the ondemand governor, so I had to build a custom kernel to fix that.
gcarvalho · 1h ago
Looking forward to upgrade over the weekend.
Have had my RPi on Debian since Debian 9, with smooth upgrades every time.
superkuh · 1h ago
Biggest change for me is /tmp behavior. In Debian 13 /tmp become RAM-disk by default (instead of files on the file system) and uses up to 50% of available ram. But as expected of Debian the release notes included an easy fix to restore normal /tmp behavior for people and applications that place many small or large files there.
>"You can return to /tmp being a regular directory by running systemctl mask tmp.mount as root and rebooting."
I kind of wish the distros had decided on a new /tmpfs (or /tmp/tmpfs, etc) directory for applications to opt-in to using ram-disk rather than replacing /tmp and having to opt-out.
bbarnett · 1h ago
Also watch out for surprise file deletes in /tmp and /var/tmp at 10 and 30 days.
This too can be turned off.
KORraN · 36m ago
Isn't this the feature of /tmp? I set my default download location in Firefox to /tmp exactly for this reason, so that all the junk gets automatically removed after some time. Also, whenever I need a temporary Python script or test a package, I create a venv under /tmp.
superkuh · 31m ago
On boot has been the standard for a long time and is still the most common. I am personally surprised to hear that now Debian and some distros do it via various automated ways at time intervals.
bryanlarsen · 1h ago
Infinite scroll length on terminals can chew through /tmp, and systems misbehave strangely when they're out of /tmp.
3eb7988a1663 · 1h ago
Maybe title should note that it has now been released? There has been many updates about Trixie in the past few months in preparation for today.
cocoto · 1h ago
I think the title has been trimmed from the word “realeased”. Might be another case of HN auto title edit botching the original title.
charcircuit · 20m ago
So what is the actual difference. These release notes are not very clear. They just give version bumps. How can people get excited when you give them nothing to get excited about?
Paianni · 2h ago
The Devuan version may end up being the last that GNOME will run on...
josteink · 1h ago
I've upgraded all my servers and laptops to Debian 13.
Lucky 13 and all... And not a single issue so far. Very happy!
Thanks to the Debian team for putting out yet another high quality, reliable release :)
markus_zhang · 1h ago
When can we have Bandit or Bluey?
Balinares · 24m ago
Presumably not before Debian runs out of Toy Story characters.
hiprob · 1h ago
I can't believe we've come to such a high number, and a particularly lucky one at that
Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.
prmoustache · 36m ago
You can install debian and ubuntu with same DE and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference apart from the theme unless you are a power user who knows what snap is.
In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).
The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.
simion314 · 5m ago
>The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free
Assuming you are not malicious I will kindly help with your bad memory, Ubuntu had always very good proprietary driver support, this made laptops actually work and helped beginners. I also remember they had a graphical installer compared to Debian and for sure this was beginners friendly. Maybe some other distro offered easy way to install and come with proprietary drivers setup but I can't remember a deb based distro doing that.
Anyway you were wrong, the CDs were not the only thing made Ubuntu appeal for beginners, there were Linux magazines with CDs each month and they were not super expensive , my first linux was a Kubuntu 6.10 from a magazine and I am still running Kubuntu today though i ran Debian, Sidux, Arch, Mandriva, SUSE in the past when I had time to try different distros, compile custom kernels etc.
amtamt · 1h ago
Two kids in 4 to 16 range, and two adults in 30 to 46 age ranges have been using Debian on daily basis for almost a decade now. At least three of them are pretty "average home user". There has been forced use of windows (since school and employers wanted), but for home use Debian has always been better due to less maintenance needs and no distractions.
accrual · 1h ago
> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user
I think that's fine for Debian. Maybe even a good thing.
Debian supplies a rock solid base for many general purpose tasks. Ubuntu and other distros are free to package that up in a user friendly way, but as a technical user I want to be able to go upstream and get a basic Linux system without extra stuff.
cocoto · 1h ago
The installation is slightly easier (but still hard because of USB install) and the website has a more appealing design. Except from that what is better in Ubuntu for the average casual user? Proprietary blobs are now included in the default installer since version 12.
josteink · 1h ago
Don't feed the troll, etc... But I just had to bite on this bit:
> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.
It's true that Ubuntu used to be the OOB ready version of Debian, which "just worked", while base Debian took look of fiddling to even have wifi working.
These day though I find the opposite to be true: Ubuntu does lots of weird things I don't want, and I have to "fiddle" to disable all that. A base Debian install however (ISO with firmware bundled), just works.
For me, Ubuntu is officially off my list of distros I bother spending my time on.
jm4 · 2h ago
I have always held the Debian project in high regard. For quite a long time, it was my preferred distribution. I only recently found out they not only have a sexual predator as a contributor, but they also invited him to be a speaker at their conference.
This is perhaps a controversial opinion, but that is a deal breaker for me. It's one thing to have someone with a criminal history as a contributor. It's another thing entirely to put a vile sexual predator who committed offenses against a minor front and center and have that person speaking on behalf of the project.
This project has little credibility with me anymore.
heikkilevanto · 1h ago
Citation needed. I honestly do not know what you are referring to. Even if I had to take your "sexual predator" at face value, I would still have to balance that against the good stable reliable distro they have been done for so many years.
stouset · 1h ago
I too had no idea what he’s talking about, so I did some digging.
So, an open-source contributor who works for Canonical on Ubuntu gave a talk at Debconf. He is a convicted and admitted sexual predator who served time in prison for his crimes. This all is pretty well-documented.
But… then what? He did the time for his crimes. He’s on the national sex offender registry. What now? Should he be unemployable? Should his contributions to open-source projects be rejected? Should he not be able to give a talk on some technical topic he’s presumably an expert on?
Either we agree that serving your prison sentence is sufficient atonement for your crimes or we have to work to change the prison system such that it is. I don’t know that excluding someone from contributing to society for the rest of their life is the right answer.
Please note that this is a very shallow summary for those who (like me) were unaware of the drama here. I have no idea of the extent of his crimes past what I wrote above, nor if the time he served “seems” appropriate (not that a single value there could ever be considered appropriate by everyone simultaneously). My assumptions are that he was convicted, served a reasonably appropriate amount of time, was released, and has committed no further crimes of that nature in the intervening period since (any or all of which I could be wrong about).
I also have seen accusations of rude/antagonistic behavior outside of this specific topic, but am leaving those aside since they weren’t part of GP’s complaint.
Santosh83 · 1h ago
He was also a minor when the convicted offences took place. Important point because Lunduke acolytes always go everywhere & make it sound as if he was a grown man who molested children "thousands of times". Apparently what is closer to the facts is that he was himself a minor when he started SA his siblings, which was ignored by their parents. He was convicted later in life as an adult & as noted, served his time.
josteink · 1h ago
> Should his contributions to open-source projects be rejected?
As someone whose attitude towards open-source is that it's the code who should do the talking, and not who contributed it (nor the colour of their skin, or their sexual orientation, etc) ... I'd say he should be able to contribute code, as long as the code is good enough. Same rule as every other code-contribution.
But the Debian-project has made the decision to elevate him and have him represent Debian at conferences like DebConf, and that strikes me as something some people might find more objectionable.
Even after having served his time, there's still a certain stain there, and it's up to the Debian project to what degree they want that stain to reflect on them as well.
jddj · 47m ago
Without derailing this too far further, while we're on reflections it might be interesting to consider what can be read into the virtues or failings of the unbounded punishment camp here.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>Even after having served his time, there's still a certain stain there
In Western jurisprudence the basis for society enacting punishment on criminals is that the punishment is just. One characteristic of that is it that it is proportionate which means it has an end. Criminals who have done their time don't have "stains" or marks as if they're Cain, they have a right to reintegration, because if they didn't, what exactly was the punishment doing?
So no, it doesn't reflect badly on any software project for employing a person who has payed for their crime. It reflects well on any employer if they treat ex-convicts equally.
LtdJorge · 1h ago
Jeremy Bicha
josteink · 1h ago
I believe this is the guy he's talking about. By linking to this, I'm not saying the allegations are true, but it's the discussion I've seen mentioned elsewhere, which I believe OP is referring to:
> Tomorrow, July 14th, at the annual Debian Conference (DebConf ‘25), Jeremy Bicha will be speaking.
> Bicha, as we learned last week (after he defaced an open source wiki page, calling people “Nazis”), is a registered sex offender — convicted after having committed “thousands” of assaults of young children.
> Bicha, an employee of Canonical (the parent company of Ubuntu) will be representing both Debian and GNOME at DebConf 25.
Edit: Digging deeper into the X threads, this seems to be one of the root the sources of the claim:
Edit 2: Just to be clear, I myself am a Debian user. Not a hater. I'd just hate to see Debian's reputation needlessly tarnished by having the wrong people promoted to publicly represent the project.
abrouwers · 1h ago
I'm not commenting about the allegations themselves (which may be true), but be careful citing Lunduke - he's a pretty famous click-baity megatroll in the OSS world.
wiseowise · 2h ago
Your comment might be taken more seriously if you provide more context.
I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front. I like the stable/testing package streams, which make it easy to choose old but rock-stable vs just a bit old and almost as stable.
And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.
Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.
On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None of them created any problems for a very, very long time. To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU systems crashed.
...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf files without using man, heh. :)
Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
In what way Ubuntu went downhill?
I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream.
The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir.
My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile.
Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.
I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.
Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded) appliances are built upon Debian, for example.
P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra do not collect such information. You can install "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no" during installation, so most people do not send in package selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap installations.
Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are proprietary".
Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an established and already much better organized system like Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another level of indirection.
I can't seem to find it. Any pointers would be helpful, so at least I can know the latest state of this thing.
The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is not winning any popularity contests either.
But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap that freedom.
Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps without asking their users in order to "create a positive pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't sit well with the users.
> But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at all would be flathub
But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone and thinking whether my packages will be there next morning.
Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that ecosystem.
I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in shortest way possible.
I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You don't have to install it manually.
There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this was the official answer).
This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.
Switch to sudo-rs, uu-coreutils (rust based stuff), etc., etc.
It's not a Debian derivative anymore. It's something else.
Was not my cup of tea before, it's even more not my cup of tea now.
snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw.
It's neverending, and it's always failing.
In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack.
As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.
On a personal note, Trixie is very exciting for me because my side project, ntfy [1], was packaged [2] and is now included in Trixie. I only learned about the fact that it was included very late in cycle when the package maintainer asked for license clarifications. As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine). I approached the maintainer and just recently added build tags [3] to make it easier to remove Stripe, Firebase and WebPush, so that the next Debian-ized version will not have to contain (so many) awkward patches.
As an "upstream maintainer", I must say it isn't obvious at all why the web app wasn't included. It was clearly removed on purpose [4], but I don't really know what to do to get it into the next Debian release. Doing an "apt install ntfy" is going to be quite disappointing for most if the web app doesn't work. Any help or guidance is very welcome!
[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ntfy
[3] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/pull/1420
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/ahmadkhalifa/ntfy/-/blob/debian/lat...
> The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.
Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.
Debian sources need to be sufficient to build. So for npm projects, you usually have a debian-specific package.json each npm dependency (transitively, including devDependencies needed for build) needs to be either be replaced with its equivalent debian package (which may need to also be ported) or vendored (usually less ideal, especially for third-party code). Oh, and enjoy aligning versions for all of that. That's doable but non-trivial work with such a sizable lockfile. If I would guess the maintainer couldn't justify the extra effort and taking on combing through all those packages.
I also think in either case the Debian way woukd probably be to split it out as a complementary ntfy-web package.
Debian has been the stable footing of my Free computing life for three decades. Everything about their approach — from showing me Condorcet, organising stable chaos, moving forward by measured consensus, and basing everything on hard wrought principles — has had an effect on me in some way, from technical to social and back again.
I love this project and the immeasurable impact it has had on the world through their releases and culture.
With all my love, g’o xx
Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!
OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.
I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less horsepower than a raspberry pi or N100.
(Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine these days)
> The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU.
If that's all there's to it, you can still use debootstrap, compile a kernel, and point the root parameter to your shiny new install.
If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies.
True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run regular Pentiums today if compiled for it, but SSE2 optimizations requires at least a Pentium 4 or Core CPUs instead.
I play with retro PCs often and found OpenBSD's i386 target stopped supporting real 386 CPUs after the 4.1 release, and dropped support for i486 somewhat recently in 6.8. It now requires at least a Pentium class CPU, i586, though the arch is still referred to as i386 likely because it's a common proxy for "32-bit".
Minimal: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-cd/deb...
Full: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-dvd/de...
I do wonder, where are PowerPC and IBM System z being used these days? Are there modern Linux systems being deployed with something other than amd64, arm64, and (soon?) riscv64?
From my build box:
There is a weird depends you cannot get around without simultaneously removing and installing in parallel. A Debian bug highlighted the above, with a "-" for systemd-sysv- systemd- as a fix, along with allow remove essential.After this fix, sysvinit builds with debootstrap were almost identical as to bookworm. This includes for desktops.
As per with bookworm through buster, you'll still need something like this too:
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....
Here's a one-liner, excluding a bond interface and lo. Gives a nice list of pre and post change. The doc's logic is that after you've upgraded to trixie, and before reboot, you're running enough of systemd to see what it will name interfaces after reboot.So far I have not had an interface change due to upgrade, so I cannot say that the above does detect it.
What I did is switch to NetBSD.
My first system migrated in less than 10 minutes, incl. package downloads and reboot. It's not a beast either. N100 mini PC connected to a ~50mbps network.
I’m not familiar with the metric definition they use, but I’d be worried if close to 100% of the packages they included in bookworm hadn’t been updated in the roughly 2 years between releases.
I use Debian for most of my servers, so I’m sure there is a valid explanation of that phrase.
And even if it was?
If you look at the number of packages in Debian, only a small portion have CVEs. There are nearly 30k package sources, and an output of 60k binary packages.
Yet we only get a few security updates weekly.
Another example? Both trixie and bookworm use the same firefox ESR (extended release) version. Both will get updated when firefox forces everyone to the next ESR.
Beyond that, some packages are docs. Some are 'glue' packages, eg scripts to manage Debian. These may not change between releases.
Lastly, Debian actually maintains an enormous number of upstream orphaned packages. In those cases, the version number is the same (sometimes), but with security updates slapped on if required.
From my perspective, outside of timely and quick security updates, I have zero desire for a lot of churn. Why would I? Churn means work. Churn means changed stability.
We get plenty of fun and churn from kernel, and driver related changes (X, Wayland, audio/nic, etc), and desktop apps. And of course from anything running forward, with scissors, like network connected joy.
Code doesn't "go bad" and not everything is affected by ecosystem churn and CVEs.
An established package not having updates for 2y is not in and of itself problematic.
Hardware support is good and UI is great! It feels snappier than Ubuntu, may be due to lack of snap and fewer services and applications installed by default.
Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)
EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.
What does this mean? If all 69k+ packages are installed, it will take up this much space?
The thing I like most about Debian is that you need to know at least a little about what is going on to use it. For me, it does a good job of following "as simple as possible and no simpler."
I've found it pretty easy though to use some KDE components built from source on top of the standard Debian packages. Build with kdesrc-build, then have those binaries linked to from your ~/bin and you're set. It might get difficult if you want to rebuild some key components like plasmashell itself but I've been using locally built versions of Kate and Konsole without issue.
Have had my RPi on Debian since Debian 9, with smooth upgrades every time.
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....
>"You can return to /tmp being a regular directory by running systemctl mask tmp.mount as root and rebooting."
I kind of wish the distros had decided on a new /tmpfs (or /tmp/tmpfs, etc) directory for applications to opt-in to using ram-disk rather than replacing /tmp and having to opt-out.
This too can be turned off.
Lucky 13 and all... And not a single issue so far. Very happy!
Thanks to the Debian team for putting out yet another high quality, reliable release :)
Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.
In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).
The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.
Assuming you are not malicious I will kindly help with your bad memory, Ubuntu had always very good proprietary driver support, this made laptops actually work and helped beginners. I also remember they had a graphical installer compared to Debian and for sure this was beginners friendly. Maybe some other distro offered easy way to install and come with proprietary drivers setup but I can't remember a deb based distro doing that.
Anyway you were wrong, the CDs were not the only thing made Ubuntu appeal for beginners, there were Linux magazines with CDs each month and they were not super expensive , my first linux was a Kubuntu 6.10 from a magazine and I am still running Kubuntu today though i ran Debian, Sidux, Arch, Mandriva, SUSE in the past when I had time to try different distros, compile custom kernels etc.
I think that's fine for Debian. Maybe even a good thing.
Debian supplies a rock solid base for many general purpose tasks. Ubuntu and other distros are free to package that up in a user friendly way, but as a technical user I want to be able to go upstream and get a basic Linux system without extra stuff.
> Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.
It's true that Ubuntu used to be the OOB ready version of Debian, which "just worked", while base Debian took look of fiddling to even have wifi working.
These day though I find the opposite to be true: Ubuntu does lots of weird things I don't want, and I have to "fiddle" to disable all that. A base Debian install however (ISO with firmware bundled), just works.
For me, Ubuntu is officially off my list of distros I bother spending my time on.
This is perhaps a controversial opinion, but that is a deal breaker for me. It's one thing to have someone with a criminal history as a contributor. It's another thing entirely to put a vile sexual predator who committed offenses against a minor front and center and have that person speaking on behalf of the project.
This project has little credibility with me anymore.
So, an open-source contributor who works for Canonical on Ubuntu gave a talk at Debconf. He is a convicted and admitted sexual predator who served time in prison for his crimes. This all is pretty well-documented.
But… then what? He did the time for his crimes. He’s on the national sex offender registry. What now? Should he be unemployable? Should his contributions to open-source projects be rejected? Should he not be able to give a talk on some technical topic he’s presumably an expert on?
Either we agree that serving your prison sentence is sufficient atonement for your crimes or we have to work to change the prison system such that it is. I don’t know that excluding someone from contributing to society for the rest of their life is the right answer.
Please note that this is a very shallow summary for those who (like me) were unaware of the drama here. I have no idea of the extent of his crimes past what I wrote above, nor if the time he served “seems” appropriate (not that a single value there could ever be considered appropriate by everyone simultaneously). My assumptions are that he was convicted, served a reasonably appropriate amount of time, was released, and has committed no further crimes of that nature in the intervening period since (any or all of which I could be wrong about).
I also have seen accusations of rude/antagonistic behavior outside of this specific topic, but am leaving those aside since they weren’t part of GP’s complaint.
As someone whose attitude towards open-source is that it's the code who should do the talking, and not who contributed it (nor the colour of their skin, or their sexual orientation, etc) ... I'd say he should be able to contribute code, as long as the code is good enough. Same rule as every other code-contribution.
But the Debian-project has made the decision to elevate him and have him represent Debian at conferences like DebConf, and that strikes me as something some people might find more objectionable.
Even after having served his time, there's still a certain stain there, and it's up to the Debian project to what degree they want that stain to reflect on them as well.
In Western jurisprudence the basis for society enacting punishment on criminals is that the punishment is just. One characteristic of that is it that it is proportionate which means it has an end. Criminals who have done their time don't have "stains" or marks as if they're Cain, they have a right to reintegration, because if they didn't, what exactly was the punishment doing?
So no, it doesn't reflect badly on any software project for employing a person who has payed for their crime. It reflects well on any employer if they treat ex-convicts equally.
https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1944505084919816337
> Tomorrow, July 14th, at the annual Debian Conference (DebConf ‘25), Jeremy Bicha will be speaking.
> Bicha, as we learned last week (after he defaced an open source wiki page, calling people “Nazis”), is a registered sex offender — convicted after having committed “thousands” of assaults of young children.
> Bicha, an employee of Canonical (the parent company of Ubuntu) will be representing both Debian and GNOME at DebConf 25.
Edit: Digging deeper into the X threads, this seems to be one of the root the sources of the claim:
https://wng.org/articles/the-high-cost-of-negligence-1617309...
Edit 2: Just to be clear, I myself am a Debian user. Not a hater. I'd just hate to see Debian's reputation needlessly tarnished by having the wrong people promoted to publicly represent the project.