7 ms·

Principles matter!

by devdao 4y ago

Principles matter!

throwaway48375 4y ago
They are the only reason I use Debian at all.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  This could be seen as a benefit and a downside. It’s basically suggesting that you find other distros nicer to use but chose to use the less nice one due to principals. Most users will pick the nicer to use one.
  - zrm 4y ago
    Debian is one of the top Linux distributions, so there are empirically a large number of people not being deterred. And many of the other top Linux distributions are Debian derivatives which both participate in the community and provide the alternate experience. Upholding its principles is the way Debian distinguishes itself. If you don't like it, use Mint or something.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Debian is a great project I know. But the comment that they only use debian for its principals directly suggests they would use something else if principals were not considered. Suggesting the other distros are better for their uses. Anecdotally I don't think I have ever seen a debian desktop user, and I wouldn't pick it for desktop either because they don't make it easy to get everything working like other distros do where you check a box on install to include the proprietary bits.
      - donalhunt 4y ago
        There are dozens of us!! Have been using Debian as my daily driver for 5+ years on both desktops and laptops. No issues at all though I did spend some time on gnome shell to get it closer to what I prefer (multiple desktops, alt-tab behaviour, etc)
      - jcelerier 4y ago
        The engineering school I went to used Debian on every desktop
        maratc 4y ago
        Was it because of the principals of your school?
        jcelerier 4y ago
        I have no idea but it stayed through many staff changes. The university I went to next (U. Bordeaux, ~50k students) 's comp. sci. department computers were also running Debian iirc.
        maratc 4y ago
        It wasn't a question per se, but rather a lazy joke at people sometimes misspelling "principles" as "principals" :)
      - ACS_Solver 4y ago
        I'm a Debian desktop user not because of principles - I use proprietary blobs including Nvidia's drivers - but just because it's what works best of the distros I know. I've been burned a couple times too many on Ubuntu's regressions. They'll ship a newer version of a package that breaks some use case which isn't super common but not super obscure either, and then I have to figure out what broke. I've stopped trusting Ubuntu's packages so I don't use Mint either even though I like the distro. Debian continues to impress me with its stability. I run the testing branch at home and breakage is still extremely rare. Yes, there's things that Debian makes harder to set up, and running Debian means you basically resign yourself to running a userspace that's 1+ year old, but the overall experience just works better in my experience. Maybe I should give Fedora a serious try one day. I haven't properly used any Red Hat based desktop since Mandrake but I did like CentOS a lot for servers.
      - yakubin 4y ago
        I use Debian on desktop, because it's the most problem-free distro I've used. Once something works, it usually stays this way with no effort on my part. Ubuntu was the opposite for me, which is weird given how it's a Debian derivative. I don't care about FOSS, so the principles are not a motivation for me.
      - mmcgaha 4y ago
        Debian desktop user off and on (mostly on) for 25 years checking in. I use it exactly because it is easy to get everything working.
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        Another Debian desktop user here. Ages ago I tried a lot of different distros, but none of them just stay running like Debian. My computers are for using, not for fixing random errors at inconvenient times. The installation process, that I have to run when a local disk eventually fails is insignificant compared to constantly fixing shit. (And yes, it's not a nice process - even worse because every time I run it, it changed.)
    - rincebrain 4y ago
      I think the question becomes, are people using Debian in large part because of those principles, or in spite of the inconveniences that come with them because of other benefits (e.g. it's a fairly well-maintained, stable Linux distribution, that very aggressively believes if something worked on 11.0 it better still work on 11.9)? If we look at popcon[1], it currently says 11.84% of users who opted into popcon regularly use the "firmware-misc-nonfree" package, along with 9.57% for the realtek package, 8.76% for the modern Intel wifi firmware package (iwlwifi), and 7.07% for firmware-amd-graphics. I can't claim that's a statistically significant percentage of Debian users, I don't have that data, but of the ones who volunteered their information, even assuming perfect overlap, a not insignificant number of users are happily opting into the "not officially Debian, we swear" portion of the world. [1] - https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree
      - lmm 4y ago
        I'd expect opting into popcon and not caring about freeness to be highly correlated.
      - scbrg 4y ago
        Speaking as someone who is part of this "significant percentage of Debian users", I'd like to point out that opting in is the key part in the phrase "happily opting into". I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me. I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"
        rincebrain 4y ago
        I don't think anyone is proposing removing the ability to not install with nonfree packages, merely whether the default should remain as it is. Personally, while I would prefer to be able to change and replace the software running on the tiny computers that make up a modern system, focusing on the distinction between "the vendor shipped it on a flash chip so we don't have to think about it" and "we need to load it at runtime" seemed a bit like spending too much effort on too little reward, to me - if we convince the manufacturer to up the cost by a few cents to hide the firmware blob from us, is that really a victory for Free Software, simply because we don't have to think about it? (Particularly if it sometimes results in never having ready access to a mechanism to replace the firmware blob, should someone sufficiently motivated either convince them to Free it or develop a replacement?) It's great whenever someone develops replacements bits or, even more rarely, convinces a company to release their firmware bits permissively, but without a list of examples of Debian's stance changing the policies of other organizations, I think it's not that effective a tool for changing behavior in this case, and instead primarily inconveniences people who want to use Debian. Whether they end up changing the default behavior or not, people in this thread replying "wait, there are firmware-bundled images?" makes me think Debian should either stop making them or stop making them so unintuitive to discover.
  - throwaway48375 4y ago
    I don't want non-free software. I don't find other distros nicer to use. I chose a distribution whose values aligned with mine. I have switched before and will, admittedly reluctantly, change again to find one whose principals align with mine. I find Debian, as it exists now, the correct balance of ease of use while still respecting my ideals.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      I line-up with Debian's principled stand against non-free blobs. Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness. I realise that these incentives are strictly at the margin; but Debian is the only leading distro that takes a hard line on these matters. If Debian were to retire from the battlefield, nobody would be left standing except the closed-firmware hardware makers. That would make me sad.
      - pabs3 4y ago
        The problem is that freedom respecting hardware pretty much doesn't exist if you are buying the latest generation of hardware from popular vendors. Even if you are willing to go outside of x86, even the latest generation of OpenPOWER requires blobs.
      - cesarb 4y ago
        > By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness. Actually, it only incentives people to buy and manufacturers to offer equipment which has the exact same blobs on a NAND chip on the equipment itself. It's more convenient, sure, since there's no need to find a copy of (the correct version of) the blob and load it together with the driver, but it still depends on these blobs.

Principles matter!

by devdao 4y ago

Principles matter!

throwaway48375 4y ago

They are the only reason I use Debian at all.

Gigachad 4y ago
This could be seen as a benefit and a downside. It’s basically suggesting that you find other distros nicer to use but chose to use the less nice one due to principals. Most users will pick the nicer to use one.
- zrm 4y ago
  Debian is one of the top Linux distributions, so there are empirically a large number of people not being deterred. And many of the other top Linux distributions are Debian derivatives which both participate in the community and provide the alternate experience. Upholding its principles is the way Debian distinguishes itself. If you don't like it, use Mint or something.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Debian is a great project I know. But the comment that they only use debian for its principals directly suggests they would use something else if principals were not considered. Suggesting the other distros are better for their uses. Anecdotally I don't think I have ever seen a debian desktop user, and I wouldn't pick it for desktop either because they don't make it easy to get everything working like other distros do where you check a box on install to include the proprietary bits.
    - donalhunt 4y ago
      There are dozens of us!! Have been using Debian as my daily driver for 5+ years on both desktops and laptops. No issues at all though I did spend some time on gnome shell to get it closer to what I prefer (multiple desktops, alt-tab behaviour, etc)
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      The engineering school I went to used Debian on every desktop
      - maratc 4y ago
        Was it because of the principals of your school?
        jcelerier 4y ago
        I have no idea but it stayed through many staff changes. The university I went to next (U. Bordeaux, ~50k students) 's comp. sci. department computers were also running Debian iirc.
        maratc 4y ago
        It wasn't a question per se, but rather a lazy joke at people sometimes misspelling "principles" as "principals" :)
    - ACS_Solver 4y ago
      I'm a Debian desktop user not because of principles - I use proprietary blobs including Nvidia's drivers - but just because it's what works best of the distros I know. I've been burned a couple times too many on Ubuntu's regressions. They'll ship a newer version of a package that breaks some use case which isn't super common but not super obscure either, and then I have to figure out what broke. I've stopped trusting Ubuntu's packages so I don't use Mint either even though I like the distro. Debian continues to impress me with its stability. I run the testing branch at home and breakage is still extremely rare. Yes, there's things that Debian makes harder to set up, and running Debian means you basically resign yourself to running a userspace that's 1+ year old, but the overall experience just works better in my experience. Maybe I should give Fedora a serious try one day. I haven't properly used any Red Hat based desktop since Mandrake but I did like CentOS a lot for servers.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      I use Debian on desktop, because it's the most problem-free distro I've used. Once something works, it usually stays this way with no effort on my part. Ubuntu was the opposite for me, which is weird given how it's a Debian derivative. I don't care about FOSS, so the principles are not a motivation for me.
    - mmcgaha 4y ago
      Debian desktop user off and on (mostly on) for 25 years checking in. I use it exactly because it is easy to get everything working.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Another Debian desktop user here. Ages ago I tried a lot of different distros, but none of them just stay running like Debian. My computers are for using, not for fixing random errors at inconvenient times. The installation process, that I have to run when a local disk eventually fails is insignificant compared to constantly fixing shit. (And yes, it's not a nice process - even worse because every time I run it, it changed.)
  - rincebrain 4y ago
    I think the question becomes, are people using Debian in large part because of those principles, or in spite of the inconveniences that come with them because of other benefits (e.g. it's a fairly well-maintained, stable Linux distribution, that very aggressively believes if something worked on 11.0 it better still work on 11.9)? If we look at popcon[1], it currently says 11.84% of users who opted into popcon regularly use the "firmware-misc-nonfree" package, along with 9.57% for the realtek package, 8.76% for the modern Intel wifi firmware package (iwlwifi), and 7.07% for firmware-amd-graphics. I can't claim that's a statistically significant percentage of Debian users, I don't have that data, but of the ones who volunteered their information, even assuming perfect overlap, a not insignificant number of users are happily opting into the "not officially Debian, we swear" portion of the world. [1] - https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree
    - lmm 4y ago
      I'd expect opting into popcon and not caring about freeness to be highly correlated.
    - scbrg 4y ago
      Speaking as someone who is part of this "significant percentage of Debian users", I'd like to point out that opting in is the key part in the phrase "happily opting into". I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me. I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"
      - rincebrain 4y ago
        I don't think anyone is proposing removing the ability to not install with nonfree packages, merely whether the default should remain as it is. Personally, while I would prefer to be able to change and replace the software running on the tiny computers that make up a modern system, focusing on the distinction between "the vendor shipped it on a flash chip so we don't have to think about it" and "we need to load it at runtime" seemed a bit like spending too much effort on too little reward, to me - if we convince the manufacturer to up the cost by a few cents to hide the firmware blob from us, is that really a victory for Free Software, simply because we don't have to think about it? (Particularly if it sometimes results in never having ready access to a mechanism to replace the firmware blob, should someone sufficiently motivated either convince them to Free it or develop a replacement?) It's great whenever someone develops replacements bits or, even more rarely, convinces a company to release their firmware bits permissively, but without a list of examples of Debian's stance changing the policies of other organizations, I think it's not that effective a tool for changing behavior in this case, and instead primarily inconveniences people who want to use Debian. Whether they end up changing the default behavior or not, people in this thread replying "wait, there are firmware-bundled images?" makes me think Debian should either stop making them or stop making them so unintuitive to discover.
- throwaway48375 4y ago
  I don't want non-free software. I don't find other distros nicer to use. I chose a distribution whose values aligned with mine. I have switched before and will, admittedly reluctantly, change again to find one whose principals align with mine. I find Debian, as it exists now, the correct balance of ease of use while still respecting my ideals.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I line-up with Debian's principled stand against non-free blobs. Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness. I realise that these incentives are strictly at the margin; but Debian is the only leading distro that takes a hard line on these matters. If Debian were to retire from the battlefield, nobody would be left standing except the closed-firmware hardware makers. That would make me sad.
    - pabs3 4y ago
      The problem is that freedom respecting hardware pretty much doesn't exist if you are buying the latest generation of hardware from popular vendors. Even if you are willing to go outside of x86, even the latest generation of OpenPOWER requires blobs.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      > By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness. Actually, it only incentives people to buy and manufacturers to offer equipment which has the exact same blobs on a NAND chip on the equipment itself. It's more convenient, sure, since there's no need to find a copy of (the correct version of) the blob and load it together with the driver, but it still depends on these blobs.