@ibuprofen Debian itself is generally a reasonable choice.

Releases are generally around 2 years apart. Which is a bit slow. But it's generally possible to backport leaf packages.

Anything more than that, and you risk breakage.

Ubuntu is a reasonable choice for beginners, because they try to make the install smooth. At least that used to be their reputation. Debian assumes you know what you are doing, so does not babysit the user.

@FaheemMitha backport from where?

@AndrasDeak Usually unstable. Sometimes experimental. Sometimes testing.

Also often one can reuse the existing Debian packaging with new upstream releases.

The sticking point is usually adjusting the existing Debian packages.

Patches, not packages. Sorry.

@FaheemMitha Why not use one of those newer releases?

@AndrasDeak This assumes one wants to use stable. If you don't want to use stable, this doesn't apply, of course.

And testing and stable aren't technically releases.

OK

I guess the next release is about to arrive.

14th August.

@FaheemMitha Very close to birthday.

@PrabhjotSingh Whose birthday?

@FaheemMitha Yours?

@PrabhjotSingh True, though I didn't realise you knew my birthday.

Look out the window: that smiling man waving at you is Prabhjot!

@AndrasDeak No windows here.

@FaheemMitha BTW I agree with you when you say about fascism.

@PrabhjotSingh What did I say?

@PrabhjotSingh And how are you doing today? All the pharma stocks crashed today, for no reason. I will never understand the stock market.

Is there any generally agreed upon hierarchy of motherboard manufacturers? Or are they pretty much all the same? My current machine (built 2013) has an ASUS.

So xkcd finally made a strip about Bash. And friends.

Which actually is nearly a year old.

Actually, that probably applies to half the Unix programs about there.

And OpenSSL too.

Wow, that's a big onebox.

@FaheemMitha it's not entirely accurate though because often times that project stopped being maintained in 2003

@jesse_b Which project?

@FaheemMitha the one that modern infrastructure depends on

@FaheemMitha isn't that leftpad?

@jesse_b Did you have anything specific in mind? And if it stopped being maintained in 2003, would it be part of modern infrastructure?

@AndrasDeak Leftpad?

@FaheemMitha I think you're missing the point of the comic you shared ;)

@jesse_b How so?

@FaheemMitha Hmm, maybe not, because that guy has a Turkish name

unless the Nebraska part is hyperbole

the whole point of it is that many modern projects rely on some obscure thing that is poorly maintained

Oh, Javascript.

@jesse_b Well, it didn't say "poorly". It said "thanklessly". Which it is, by definition.

yeah but it also said "some random person" which means poorly

ideally you don't want to rely on someone's side project

@jesse_b Not necessarily, although likelily

@jesse_b That's an odd conclusion to draw.

Let's say someone considers either or both of us random people.

even if the random person is good and active it's still a single person and not a team that works for profit for an organization

which means the rug can be pulled out at any moment

Would they then be justified in concluding that we wrote poor code?

I guess "poorly maintained" is correct, because arguably a bus factor of 1 is poor maintenance

@jesse_b Well, yes. That's part of the point.

@AndrasDeak Not the usual definition of that word. Or words.

No, you're conflating poor code with poor maintenance

part of code maintainability is that if one guy drops dead, the project can keep going

I suspect a lot of people would take issue with that. And actually most free software projects, including some very good and popular ones, are single person projects.

@AndrasDeak Poorly maintained means that the maintainer is doing a poor job. Not that he's alone.

@AndrasDeak That would be the normal/usual interpretation.

but normally an open-source project that underlies much of the world will have some kind of community around it, so it probably doesn't entirely depend on that one random guy

@FaheemMitha it would be your interpretation

@AndrasDeak How many people work on Bash?

One maintainer doing a great job can still lead to poor maintenance all things considered

@AndrasDeak Mine, and the native English speaking world.

@FaheemMitha how would I know? I'm sure there's Bourne, and Kourne, and Fiourne for starters

@AndrasDeak Huh?

Is Bash published as a public repository?

it's maintained by gnu...

@FaheemMitha My first thought was "ntp", but the hover text mentions ImageMagick, which I can also believe.

I suspect the comic is not about any specific piece of software but rather about the entire ecosystem of open source software maintained by small numbers of volunteers in their spare time that nonetheless forms part of the critical dependency chain for huge amounts of computing infrastructure

openssl, ntp, curl, imagemagick, nethack, etc

ed

if you believe Twitter, the same goes for Stack Overflow ;)

but s/volunteers/toxic techbros/

SO is maintained by an entire company, so it doesn't really fit :P

I don't envy the SO moderation team army

I know someone who used to be an SO mod and you are right not to.

before you met them, were you just a normal Frog? :)

Normal frogs can't operate a keyboard :P

... but ... Toxic ones can?!? :)

::ribbit::

@ToxicFrog Agreed, but Bash is a good example.

@ToxicFrog And who get paid nothing for their troubles.

> and who get paid nothing for their troubles

yes, that's what "volunteer" means

@ToxicFrog Yes, I know. But it's still unfair.

@FaheemMitha Yes. Debian is one of the more likely ones.

I used Slackware for years, then had one install of Debian before I went on to Ubuntu. Not for the install process so much as in general most things work out of the box. I rather spend time on coding, graphics, music, writing and the like then tweaking and hacking the system itself.

I've been using debian testing for several years now, and in general most things work out of the box

As for Ubuntu I have found that by each new release I install I have to tweak more and more of the install to get it to my liking. Hugely why I'm not going to install it next time around. It has gone over a tipping point where the "hack the system" has entered a phase where it seems like more work then it is worth.

of course YMMV if you have a strong opinion of how things should work

I have a few "requirements". As for desktop: 1) Simple classical application-menu. I almost never use a menu, and never use any other fancy replacements or the like. But sometimes it can be nice to see the various things listed by groups. 2) a decent application launcher (Using Rofi and that is nice). 3/4) This one is the hardest and that is a good alt+tab viewer + "all windows / desktop" viewer. 5) Handle multiple monitors well.

As for alt+tab and desktop overview I think GNOME is good. One can easily drag windows between desktops. Use windows-key+tab to switch between application groups, alt+tab to switch between all etc. Problem is that it has some bad bugs that go in wild loops. Simply JS scripts that is poorly written.

I ended up abandoning it for KDE, even though KDE has some bad issues itself - but that is more in the setup apartment and the applications switchers and desktop viewers are not as nice. But at lest it does not crash.

I run BIND, Apache and MySQL. But even setting up BIND was a pain last time as systemd runs all sort of network things, it's own caching nameserver etc.