• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.

    Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).

    Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of “instability”. Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.

    The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).

    Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu “freezes” a Sid version, and those packages don’t get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.



  • And before you start whining - again - about how you are fixing bugs, let me remind you about the build failures you had on big-endian machines because your patches had gotten ZERO testing outside your tree.

    As far as I know, the Linux Foundation does not provide testing infrastructure to it’s developers. Instead, corporations are expected to use their massive amount of resources to test patches across a variety of cases before contributing them.

    Yes, I think Kent is in the wrong here. Yes, I think Kent should find a sponsor or something to help him with testing and making his development more stable (stable in the sense of fewer changes over time, rather than stable as in reliable).

    But, I kinda dislike how the Linux Foundation has a sort of… corporate centric development. It results in frictions with individual developers, as shown here.

    Over all of the people Linus has chewed out over the years, I always wonder how many of them were independent developers with few resources trying to figure things out on their own. I’ve always considered trying to learn to contribute, but the Linux kernel is massive. Combined with the programming pieces I would have to learn, as well as the infrastructure and ecosystem (mailing list, patch system, etc), it feels like it would be really infeasible to get into without some kind of mentor or dedicated teacher.