Yearly driver updates? Is this a joke? [LWN.net]

Yearly driver updates? Is this a joke?

Posted Feb 16, 2009 13:37 UTC (Mon) by malor (guest, #2973)
In reply to: Yearly driver updates? Is this a joke? by khim
Parent article: Debian 5.0 released

Debian stable releases are, first and foremost, about stability. The kernel devs don't support their releases for long; two months after it's out, they drop it forever and never touch it again. This is great fun for programmers, but it's very difficult on people who have to trust their machines.

It takes at least several months to really shake a kernel out, and some releases have taken years. When you're running Debian, you can be reasonably sure your kernel is fairly well-debugged. It may not have all the chrome of this month's model, but it probably won't lose parts when you drive it off the lot.

You may prefer the chrome; that's fine. Run Unstable. That version of Debian is pretty darn bleeding-edge, and you will frequently cut yourself. "Testing" is usually both fairly current and quite solid, more like what most other distros release. But Stable? That's what you get after 18 months or two years of beating on Testing. So of course it's a little out of date. That's how long it takes to evolve to trustworthy status.

The Debian team, as fractured and political as it can get sometimes, has a real passion for quality. When they call a release done, it's pretty well cooked. It takes them longer than pretty much any other distro, but it also means a lot more when they finally do release.

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Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 16, 2009 15:14 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

It takes at least several months to really shake a kernel out, and some releases have taken years. When you're running Debian, you can be reasonably sure your kernel is fairly well-debugged. It may not have all the chrome of this month's model, but it probably won't lose parts when you drive it off the lot.

Not when you're running Debian, but if you are running Debian. I've tried Debian few times in the past and never managed to even start with the beast: some thing or anyther always had no drivers in this distro (while RedHat, SUSE, or, recently, Ubuntu supported my systems just fine). I can not reach the fabled land of "both fairly current and quite solid" testing version because often it had problems with something vital: HDD, network or video. And, sadly, this trend continues with Lenny.

It does not matter how tested and bug-free your system is if you can not even use it...

P.S. Granted: this usually happens when I buy new system and consider distribution for it - but why else will I change perfectly working configuration?

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 16, 2009 15:28 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

if you buy your hardware and then go looking for what can run on it, you are going to have significant problems running linux at all, let along the more tested distros (Debian, RedHat Enterprise, etc)

I think that it's unfortunante that Debian ended up using 2.6.26 instead of 2.6.27, but only becouse 2.6.27 is a long-term supported release that is going to be getting updates (not driver updates, but other fixes) for an extended timeframe. there were also an unusually large number of new hardware (especially around wifi) that got added to 2.6.27.

that said, I almost never run a distro kernel anyway, so it doesn't bother me _that_ much ;-)

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 20, 2009 7:17 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (4 responses)

You know, that used to be the case, but one of the main selling-points of the moder updated distributions is that it's less and less the case.

Yes, sure, you can still get unlucky. And even if you're not "unlucky" it may well be that some feature of your new hardware isn't supported completely.

Still, the last few years I've several times installed ubuntu on bog-standard new laptops, not spesifically bought for ubuntu or investigated for ubuntu, and nevertheless had them "just work", right out of the box. No tweaking needed, no extra drivers or changing to "unstable" or anything of the sort needed.

Insert Live-cd (good way of testing driver-support), wait for 2-3 minutes, test hardware, everything works.

Notice, I've used Linux since I once installed Slackware from a set of floppies, running the 1.2.13 kernel. I've compiled my own kernel hundreds of times, and am familiar with atleast a dozen distributions. I don't have a problem dealing with needing a custom install-kernel or running unstable.

But get this: I also have no DESIRE to do so. When there's a choice not to, and instead use the laptop for what I bought it for, I know what my choice is gonna be.

For beginners, the choice is even more obvious. Given a choice between "Debian would work with your hardware, if you would just X, Y and Z" on the one hand and "Ubuntu works with your hardware." on the other hand, it's not even really a choice, for most beginners.

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 20, 2009 8:02 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (3 responses)

Debian stability is of a grade most attractive to system administrators. It's all-caps STABILITY, which can also be construed as 'BORING' for people whose lives or careers aren't dependent on their hardware working. Me, I love boring. Boring means it hasn't broken yet. :)

For end-users, Ubuntu is often a better choice. It's closer to the Windows model of features over stability. I mean no disrespect toward Ubuntu in that statement, but it clearly is focused first and foremost on features and usability, with stability being whatever they can provide given the first two.

Debian is more for people providing computing services to others, whether personally or professionally. If you want to be very confident about the quality of the server you install, and want to be able to administer it remotely and upgrade it smoothly, Debian stable is probably the single best Linux distro available.

For your average user, if his or her desktop crashes, it's annoying, but usually not life- or career-threatening. Users don't need the paranoia that sysadmins do, and trading away testing and shakeout time for broader hardware support is often a sensible choice. And you can always drop back to an LTS version if want something that's attractive and tested reasonably well, but can still drive fairly recent hardware.

Ubuntu is, basically, shiny Debian without much testing, and it makes a better desktop for most.

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 20, 2009 11:15 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure. But my point is, there's a fundamental difference between hardware, primarily in the form of the kernel, and userspace-programs.

If Apache is from last century, and we're running KDE 3.* alongside Python 2.4, that's okay. Assuming it's really more stable, there's many people who'd be perfectly fine with that. Not only on the server, but on a laptop too.

My father, for example. It's much more important to him that things consistently work, and stat working for a long time, rather than new shiny features.

But, hardware is different. A more stable, well-tested kernel that FAILS to actually WORK AT ALL on my hardware isn't an alternative. *EVEN* if I highly value stability over new bleeding-edge features.

Thus, the result is that many people who WOULD like a stable and "boring" distro, nevertheless are forced away from Debian. Because they insert the Debian-DVD, and up comes a blank-screen, or a non-working wireless, or a non-working audio, or a non-working integrated web-camera or whatever.

Yes, they can avoid this by spesifically looking for an ancient-kernel-compatible laptop. But it's not that easy.

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 20, 2009 14:45 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

But, hardware is different. A more stable, well-tested kernel that FAILS to actually WORK AT ALL on my hardware isn't an alternative. *EVEN* if I highly value stability over new bleeding-edge features.

I totally hear you. Maybe the Debian guys will too; they could possibly include a linux-experimental tree (probably just pulled from Testing) in an otherwise-Stable distribution. Or, I suppose some other entity could do a boot CD of Debian Stable + the kernel from Testing or Unstable. But they'd have to maintain a separate repository for kernel updates, or else your shiny new system would probably fail after the first kernel patch in the Stable tree. It'd be an ongoing project, not just a one-off thing, and you could potentially run into some real snarls with dependencies from Testing also needing a backport. Sometimes, pulling a Testing kernel back to Stable can be pretty painful.

I don't speak for Debian, but as an outsider, it seems like people with cutting-edge hardware just aren't the target market. It feels to me that their goal is serving people who value stability enough to custom-choose their hardware to get it. To a professional-level mindset, you pick your software FIRST, and then you get the hardware that best suits your performance and budget needs. You don't buy your software to go with your hardware; that's buying a suit to match a tie. The software's the important bit; the hardware is just the method of getting the software to the place you want it.

If you're buying whatever's on sale at Best Buy, a super-reliable distro probably isn't what you want anyway, since the hardware on those machines tends to be so awful. The risk of hardware failure is so high that the increased reliability in using Debian over Ubuntu will be largely irrelevant.

Honestly, it's not like Ubuntu is terrible, you know. It's pretty solid. You're probably not going to run into any serious bugs that will mess you up, and they seem pretty responsive to problem reports, if you do a good one.

I guess... Debian is for people who fear system failure, and plan accordingly. If you're not actively afraid of what will happen if your computer crashes, Ubuntu's probably fine.

Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

Posted Feb 20, 2009 15:08 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

One other thought, a thing I really didn't touch on: you say your father prefers stability over anything else, but Debian really _can't_ provide both stability and brand new kernels. The kernel dev process is completely borked from a stability-lover's perspective; the two-month cycle times, with vast numbers of new features going in every sixty days, is completely antithetical to anything resembling a truly trustworthy or secure machine.

That dev cycle has put me through hell. I used to track linux.org kernels, but I haven't for years now, because they're such a mess. Their focus on features features features has cost me hundreds of personal dollars in replaced hardware that didn't need replacing, and uncounted hours dealing with server crashes.

I just don't see any way that Debian can both provide stability AND anything resembling a current kernel, because stability means 'no new features'. But the kernel team refuses to ever let anything shake out, and they don't backport much of anything.

I don't think you should be blaming the Debian team for this. I think they do an amazing job of extracting user-level stability from a programmer-oriented wankfest. Their inability to provide a stable kernel with recent hardware support is a problem with the kernel team, not the distro.