As mentioned in my last post, on daily operating system rotation, I'm kind of giving up on using Debian. It is not entirely clear whether this really warrants its own blog post or not, but here it is.
Decades ago I found myself running Debian on most of my systems, and I was happy doing that. While I never did become a debian developer, some might claim I was still fairly deeply invested. I did package software, both my own and other's, and distributed some of it through my personal apt repositories. Had I blogged about it back when it happened, it would probably have been interesting to tell what once drew me to Debian. But that ship has sailed, and this post will instead cover what made me aband ship.
You know how sometimes people attempt to solve problems you're not even having?
Back in my youth we had something called OSS. I can't remember all the
details, but I did actually pay money for a license once. It still sucked. Only
one process at the time could open the sound device. Thus there was an ongoing
struggle to hunt and kill that process in order to instead allow the desired
one to play sounds. Then came ALSA and all Linux related sound problems
were gone. At least for a while, until suddenly someone did that thing of
attempting to solve some fully unexperienced problem, and brought us back to a
world resembling the one of OSS. However with the difference that the audio was
always stolen by the same culprit. The hunt could be eliminated. We learnt that
if we ran sudo killall -9 pulseaudio whenever the computer had gone silent,
we got audio working again. Annoying, but only mildly so. It eventually got
better. I guess some heroes fixed something.
A few years later history repeated itself. I'm not naming names, and try to not place blame on the doers. One can however not avoid noticing that quality of Debian has seriously suffered since the project decided to fix a problem many people were not at all having. Don't get me wrong. I do understand the challenges of sysvinit, and even was the supervisor for a couple of master thesis students looking at bringing in upstart into the products of my employer back in those days. Still, I wish Debian could have had chosen a path with less random breakage. Too much has already been written about how the pid 1 replacement could had been done better. I have nothing construtive to add, and no illusions that I'll ever feel at home again. I have attempted to run Devuan here and there, but understand it to be an underresourced project with a close to impossible mission.
To be clear, I don't envision a future without ever touching a Debian, or even an Ubuntu, system. However the time when those would had been among my first choice are likely gone forever.
These ramblings might not have added much value, but I still felt it appropriate to post. Apologies to any readers feeling their time being wasted.