I struggled getting Zwift (online cycling game) running on Debian, and the issue turned out to be that WINE on Debian is a major version behind.

I did get it working, and everything else works (retro game emulators), but it’s like, huh maybe that wasn’t the best choice.

Similar for me. Debian works.

And I’m just too busy with other things to bother trying different distros. I want my computer to work with a minimum of fuss.

That said Bazzite does sound interesting and might go on my gaming system. Debian stable isn’t the best choice for that. Lol

I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.

I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.

It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.

I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.

How many of us old Slashdot users are here, anyway? 5 digit UID here.

How quickly do you think an os upgrade of this type finish?

This is what I’ve always done. It has worked fine for me every time.

I’ve been daily driving it on my desktop and laptop for several months now, seems fine. But I don’t need the bleeding edge either.

But that’s not what the comment was about… The top level comment said Debian was hard to upgrade, and I have not had that experience.

I don’t understand that comment either. I’ve been using Debian for years on my server, and it just keeps up with the times (well with Debian times, not necessarily current times).

It’s way easier than Kubuntu was for me, for example, which required reinstalling practically every time I wanted to upgrade. A few times the upgrade actually worked, but most of the time I had to reinstall.

Ummm you go first.

My kmymoney file goes on an old compact flash memory card.

My home directory (including that file), /etc, databases, and a few other things get backed up weekly on to a USB stick.

Media raid array is automatically backed up to a large drive in another computer each evening. (The raid5 array isn’t that large. It was when I built it, but now I can buy a single drive that is nearly as large as the array…)

Pictures are backed up to Amazon’s glacier deep freeze. I pay about $1/month to back up all of my pictures. I intend to put other important things there too but haven’t gotten there yet.

They’re things like drive mapping scripts, stuff like that. They’re definitely normal for our setup. Just not sure why they have to interrupt me!

I have an ongoing irritation with windows (use it for work, Linux at home): It steals focus from the window you’re using if another window opens.

Drives me nuts. I’ll be typing my password and pop! Oh look I just typed my password into something else that popped up because IT requires this program to run on login today.

KDE is much better about not stealing window focus like that.

I recall trying Mandrake at some point, but I don’t remember when. I might have had it installed on a laptop.

I read most of his points and I agree with them…

But I have so much else to worry about, I just can’t get worked up about this.

And I think he is ignoring the firestorm that would ensue if, say, openssh tried to change from using the current directory. There would probably be five forks started immediately to restore the original functionality - and is ssh really adding new features like he claims?

Maybe it could be a config option in the site install (which I thought it already was), but forcing a change to fix what is a minor problem isn’t worth the headache.

I do hate that some of those package systems install software into home. It inflates my backups dramatically and unnecessarily. I use opt for that sort of thing instead. For example, my immich docker install is in /opt.

It’s a pure Linux system now! No GNU!

I’m not clear what you’ve done here, but I’ve never played with the purge command. I take it you removed a lot of basic packages. How did it happen? Wildcards?

I assume you’ve never made any mistakes, ever. What an arrogant attitude.

I think last has it, too, but I’m not sure.

I’m not clear on your use case here - the system obviously can’t report if it’s off. Initially I thought this was in the Home Assistant community, and I was going to suggest just pinging the machine at regular intervals from the HA system. That makes sense if you’re trying to monitor various systems.

I had it happen a few times. I moved away from Kubuntu as a result.