# So who's running Deb 9?



## raindog308 (Jun 26, 2017)

I read the change list but didn't see anything major...nothing as major as moving from 7 to 8 with systemd fisting its way into my life. In fact I didn't see much in 9 that looks like that big a change. It's nice to have MariaDB 10.1 come in a major milestone release.

This is irritating: "The installer and newly installed systems will use a new standard naming scheme for network interfaces instead of eth0,eth1, etc. The old naming method suffered from enumeration race conditions that made it possible for interface names to change unexpectedly and is incompatible with mounting the root filesystem read-only. The new enumeration method relies on more sources of information, to produce a more repeatable outcome. It uses the firmware/BIOS provided index numbers and then tries PCI card slot numbers, producing names like ens0 or enp1s1 (ethernet) or wlp3s0 (wlan)."

Yeah I'd sure rather type "enp1s1" than "eth0". Ugh.


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## bsdguy (Jun 27, 2017)

Hehe.

Well, for the few cases where I use linux I use a systemd free "debian", currently antix 16 (which I kind of like). After what I read from you I'm even more glad to have left debian. If I ever switched to linux (except for antix toyboxes) I'd definitely go slackware. Most others either didn't get the mail how unix ticks or they've forgotten about it.

Well, whatever, I'm the BSD guy and I see no reason whatsoever to switch to linux.


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## maounique (Jun 27, 2017)

raindog308 said:


> Yeah I'd sure rather type "enp1s1" than "eth0". Ugh.



I gave it a spin and was wondering what the f that is, but didnt dig deeper.
All in all, I am happy it didnt change much, I am debian person for a reason, systemd is still very unpleasant, but, yeah, everyone is switching, won't hold out from a major distro run by such a large dedicated community because of this.
Debian is one of the last holdouts against corporations and governments with a significant and knowledgeable following.


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## raindog308 (Jun 28, 2017)

maounique said:


> Debian is one of the last holdouts against corporations and governments with a significant and knowledgeable following.



And who else would you put in that list?

Slackware.

Gentoo appears to be dying.

Arch? Never used it myself.

Obviously, the opposite of this would be RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Ubuntu.

There's a zillion other small distros one could list. And of course OpenBSD and NetBSD (though the latter is pretty invisible in the modern OS landscape). I haven't been around FreeBSD enough but my perception is that it follows its community rather than corporate direction.


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## bsdguy (Jun 28, 2017)

FreeBSD is indeed following its community - within a reasonable and generally agreed upon frame of reason - and we have quite good, experienced, reasonable, and proven leaders steering the ship.

As for linux distros, I think that gentoo, Arch and the like have the problem that they are *far* less comfortable than debian/redhat but at the same time less clean and basic than slack. I might be wrong but I'm under the impression that the vast majority tends to choose one of the extremes, i.e. either debian/redhat (and derivates) or slackware, which btw. has evolved a lot, too, and nowadays offers some basic comfort like (simple) packages with distros like salix.

As for myself, I tried both gentoo and Arch and found both to be unattractive and cumbersome without getting anything in return. I always thought "Oh well, I might have as well gone with slack right away". The reason, I think, is that *any* distro sugarcoating brings lots of problems with it. So, if you are Joe Clueless, you just go with Ubuntu, click, click, and don't care anyway. And if you are knowledgable you'll tend find that the sugarcoating isn't offering much of value to you and that you might as well go the .configure, make, make install route and have a clean (as in "no distro crap") linux. One experience that I remember as particularly ugly was trying to build a source package with debian. What a housekeeping and distro bureaucracy clusterfuck!


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## graeme (Jun 30, 2017)

There does seem to be a good reason for the change in network interface names.



bsdguy said:


> I might be wrong but I'm under the impression that the vast majority tends to choose one of the extremes, i.e. either debian/redhat (and derivates) or slackware



Hard to know whether you are right or not - where does one get accurate numbers from? On the other hand, Arch does seem to have an active community. I would like to try Arch because of the number of times I have found useful information on the Arch forums and wiki. A knowledgeable user base?

I think it is Debian derivatives rather than Debian itself that are at the "easy" extreme: Ubuntu, Mint etc. Debian is a little bit more work (although still pretty easy).

I do like having package management (it makes installs and updates quick and easy), and Debian's works well, so I tend to use Ubuntu (variants like Xubuntu) on desktops and Debian on servers. If you compile everything it takes longer, you are more likely to spend time solving issues, and it would be a lot more work keeping everything updated. Also, how easy is it to script installs if you are compiling everything?


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## bizzard (Jun 30, 2017)

Just upgraded a freshly installed Wheezy to Stretch and things went smooth. Playing with it for a while to see if things are fine before starting to migrate existing Wheezy boxes. Still have a Lenny in production, which does its job, but an upgrade long overdue.

On desktop, its much pain than a server to have a new os and restore the present setup. Struck with Linux Mint 17.3 for a while now, as its not supporting direct upgrade to 18. Will give Debian 9 a try in machines other than the primary one.


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## WasNotWSS (Jul 1, 2017)

Still running Jessie on the single ProxMox I setup and have working correctly, and my personal vhost box moved to Stretch. I've moved away from Debian for everything else (that I possibly can). My handful of Kimsufi left are on either OpenBSD, or Void. I really love Void.


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## coreyman (Jul 14, 2017)

Just upgraded to stretch from jessie 2 days ago here. I do like the new version of gnome as the notifications seem to come in way better. My network interfaces file still has eth* interfaces so I assume that change isn't forced on you unless it's a new install.


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## graeme (Jul 15, 2017)

One Debian 9 kids desktop, another to be installed tomorrow, and probably switching my laptop when I have the time (i.e. when it will not interrupt work too much)


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