It’s been some time since I re-installed Debian over my Kubuntu install, so I thought I’d discuss some reasons why I changed back to Debian, what my experience was like, and some learning opportunities.
One reason I made the switch was because there was a utility newly packaged for Debian, Frama-C, which was not available in Kubuntu at the time. It also frustrated me that I was having various frustrations with the installation, not the least of which was an unreliable and quite crashy KDE Plasma.
When I reinstalled this time, I picked the normal install but told it to install a graphical environment, which gave me a GNOME desktop environment. I actually rather like it, the setup didn’t ask too many questions and everything was set up perfectly. There was some minor tweaking, but it was all done by the easily accessible System menu and all the applets therein.
Now, I wanted to be able to use the server both as a virtual machine and as a physical dual-boot. This wasn’t working properly with GRUB-2, so I had to stay with version 1.96, which works rather well. I even spent some time making a pretty splashimage for it, which looks rather nice, even if I don’t see it all that often.
If I boot into the Virtual Machine, all the hardware is detected properly, and there aren’t even complaints about the fact that a bunch of hardware disappeared — certainly very good news if you decide to do something like move your hard drive to a different machine. Likewise, if I boot into the desktop, everything works well there too.
One issue I came across during the installation was having to teach Network-Manager how to configure my network interfaces. In my VMware NAT setup, there is no DHCP server, so the IP address, subnet and gateway information needs to be statically defined. Luckily, Network-Manager was able to do this based on the MAC address of the adapter — inside my virtual machine, it had a VMware-assigned static one. Through this, Network-Manager had an easy way to determine how to configure my network, and it works beautifully for Ethernet and Wireless (when Debian is running as the main operating system) and also for VMware NAT (when inside the virtual machine container).
Anyway, I have now been developing quite happily inside a Debian + GNOME desktop environment. The system runs fine even within a constrained environment, though I miss KDE’s setup with sudo; with GNOME, the option seems to be to have the root password entered every time privilege escalation is necessary. I don’t like using a root password — on my server system I don’t use the root password at all, and do everything I need to do via sudo. It’s okay for me because I log into the server with a private key and have disabled SSH password authentication for security reasons.
One thing that is still weird for me is that my system currently shows a time of 01:53 even though it is 23:57 in my timezone. Presumably the few minutes of difference is because the virtual machine clock and my system hardware clock aren’t synchronized perfectly, but more than that, I think it’s an issue with the Date applet somehow. I haven’t looked into this because the thing is running inside a virtual machine, so it doesn’t bother me much.
I have looked high and low to see where to change the time zone, and to my knowledge the system knows that it’s in the America/Toronto time zone. The house picture next to Timmins (the city I am in right now, though it doesn’t matter since the timezone is the same) seems to indicate to me that it’s set to the appropriate time zone.
I think it’s due to VMware synchronizing the virtual machine clock with my host machine clock. Windows (my host operating system) stores the time in the local format, which I believe Linux thinks is UTC. Still, it doesn’t explain the weird display it’s got going.
Someone noted last time that I didn’t make direct mention of which programs are only offered on Windows and not on Linux/etc, and that do not have reasonable replacement on these systems. Kapil Hari Paranjape noted that I was sounding somewhat like a troll by simply saying that I don’t think Linux is yet ready to replace my environment. Here was my reply:
Far from a troll, I’d really like Debian and Ubuntu, but moreso Linux in general, to improve at the pace it has been doing so. It’s made great progress since the last time I tried it out on my desktop, but I have to acknowledge that there are lots of rough edges right now that should be worked out.
One of the advantages of huge proprietary development organizations like Microsoft is that they have tons of developers and can implement new features at a relatively quick pace, even if they’re half-assed. Developers’ pride in the FOSS community prevents this overly quick pace of development in favour of more secure, more stable platforms. Which is a good thing, I think. But nonetheless it results in a “slower” development pace.
The applications I’m complaining about are things like:
- SolidWorks (a CAD tool for designing parts and assemblies, used in manufacturing and mechanical engineering)
- SpectrumSoft Micro-Cap (a version of software similar to PSpice used by my school)
- AutoCAD (another CAD tool)Luckily this is changing, but only for the large & most popular distributions:
- MathWorks MATLAB (runs on Linux and Solaris, etc.)
- Wolfram Mathematica (which has versions for Linux and MacOS X)
- FEKO (runs on Linux and Solaris among others)Anyway, I still consider SolidWorks to be a rather big program not supported on Linux, which is a big issue for those working on Civil Engineering programs. There are most probably others which are very domain-specific that I don’t even know about.
There is a nice matrix comparing cross-platform capabilities of CAD software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software
Oh, one final thought: perhaps that KDE Recommends: should be moved to a Suggests: instead, on account of its heavy dependencies, requiring mysql-server installed on desktop machines.. WTF!
Oh, and on another note, I re-installed Debian using the non-expert Auto Install and it installed Gnome rather flawlessly, much like installing Ubuntu, which was pretty nice. So kudos to those who have been working on the main installer; it seems as though the advanced ones really give you some rope to hang yourself with, though :-)
Oh, and k3ninho told me that there is an initiative from the Ubuntu community called “100 Paper Cuts” to help fix small bugs like those I was complaining about. I hope this leads to an improved user experience, and I’d really like to see some of those changes propagated both upstream to Debian and upstream to the KDE folk.
During my install of Kubuntu + KDE, I felt that plasma was crashing more than Windows Explorer — it felt like the days when I was running Windows ME, and the shell would crash, and the system would restart it. Repeatedly. It’s exactly what seemed to happen with plasma. I’m not sure if it was something I screwed up during configuration (presumably so), but KDE was far too complicated for me to try and debug. It might also have been a result of me running my system within a fairly constrained virtual machine environment – the system only gets 768MB of RAM and no access to the actual graphics processor unit (since it’s virtualized).
“with GNOME, the option seems to be to have the root password entered every time privilege escalation is necessary”
You can tell gksu (GNOME’s graphical su application) to use sudo instead of su by setting /apps/gksu/sudo-mode to true. On Debian, you can set this system-wide by doing update-alternatives –config libgksu-gconf-defaults , changing it to use sudo, and then running update-gconf-defaults. See /usr/share/doc/libgksu2-0/README.Debian for more details.
Oh! Very cool, I shall try that. Is there some way to provide that option via debconf while installing or something?
I should’ve looked at the README before speaking.
What version of KDE + plasma did you try on Kubuntu? I’m not surprised if KDE shipped with Kubuntu is a little buggy, everybody knows that Kubuntu is the redheaded stepchild of Canonical …
KDE 4.2.4 on Debian works well for me … almost no crash at all for few days already
It’s good to hear you’re having a good experience with KDE. I’m working on a project involving Qt so if people are enjoying their experience with KDE then it’s good for me. It probably was due to the version of Kubuntu I was using, it was 9.04, though I did dist-upgrade (and I’m not sure if something was mangled there).
I think the crashes aren’t a huge problem, just pretty annoying, so obviously I’d prefer the code to be written in a more robust and stable manner. But this is true not only of KDE/Plasma but of Gnome and all other complex applications, and it seems like the most successful projects inevitably spend more time on making their piece of metal “pretty” and polished rather than keeping it stable.
Sorry, but you still appear as a troll when you postulate things like:
“One of the advantages of huge proprietary development organizations like Microsoft is that they have tons of developers and can implement new features at a relatively quick pace, even if they’re half-assed. Developers’ pride in the FOSS community prevents this overly quick pace of development in favour of more secure, more stable platforms. Which is a good thing, I think. But nonetheless it results in a “slower” development pace.”
First, they don’t have “tons” of developpers. The FOSS community is, by large means, way bigger than the pool of real technical developpers at M$.
Furthermore, if you look at the current situation, it took them almost 7 years to produce a new OS. Furthermore, it sucks so much that serious people stick on XP. Even more, they had to produce, even though they had claimed they would not support XP anymore, a specific version of this almost-10-years-old OS for the netbook because their new developpements where not ready for them.
Each time I see one of these shiny new laptop running a 10 years old OS I feel astonished that this is possible. In particular when the guy running it claims to be some sort of geek found of cutting edge technology….
If you look at IE, it is the same story: most of the bugs take ages to be fixed, and the navigator remains uncompatible with a lot of specifications.
I agree that it might look different for the case of the Office suite, however.
All in all, you have the right to express yourself and to install and reinstall as many OSes as you want, but please try refrain yourself from making such general and vague statements…
Sure, the FOSS community has more developers by numbers, but these developers also have day jobs and families and other life commitments. Part of what makes companies able to deliver things better than the open source world is simply that people have more time and more motivation (since it’s their primary commitment besides family, etc). Unfortunately many of them are all too busy to be hacking on things full-time, though I have met quite a few extraordinary guys that operate their own consultancies and thus have more time to contribute to open source.
Yes, it took them 7 years to produce Vista, and yes, it does suck enough that most people (including me) have stayed with XP.
I think it’s okay to be fond of cutting-edge technology, but it’s called cutting-edge for a reason — there are more rough edges. Compare and contrast the experience you’d get on Debian stable versus testing, especially in terms of the graphical environment and all that. Open source benefits from a more frequent release cycle, and an attitude where it’s like, “if you screw up, that’s your own fault, RTFM” etc. Often interactions with developers can be hostile (if they’re the peculiar type) and support can be harder to obtain, not that these factors matter to geeks, but they matter for companies, and this is one reason why open source is yet to take over.
Regarding IE bugs, there are also Firefox bugs that need work. There was recently an article on Firefox taking forever to load on Windows due to some issue with obtaining sufficient entropy, but without providing any indication of activity besides hammering the disk, thus degrading the user experience. http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/07/09/the-firefox-3-5-fiasco.aspx