
Debian 9.2 released - rayascott
https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20171007
======
staticelf
When I run linux on servers, I always choose Debian. It is the best distro
IMO. Glad to see that the project is still going as strong as ever!

~~~
gear54rus
As someone who has been choosing CentOS for the same purpose, what would be
some reasons for me to switch off the top of your head?

~~~
buserror
I have a debian install that I've installed in 2001. It's clean, fully up to
date and has never been reinstalled. It's not necessary. It had apache1
before, it had the old exim before, it had all kind of old packages and was
gradually updated over the years. True, something like 'etckeeper' is a great
boon these days.

Still, that's what I call a server distro ;-)

~~~
StudentStuff
And yet, here I am running it on my laptop! :D

Debian is a great, stable distro. Even Sid, the unstable, rolling branch sees
little breakage overall. Sane defaults, package maintainers who care about the
minor rendering bugs in obscure packages and make the effort to patch said
bugs. I'm continually impressed by the fit & finish of Debian, especially in
context of how deep the Debian Archive is, with 68 thousand software packages
in total.

~~~
buserror
Oh sure I also run it everywhere else -- sid on my workstation, 'testing' on
my home server and laptop etc. It does cover pretty much all the bases!

But, the 'stable' server is rather amazing. I (used to) get into rpm-hell with
centos/redhat in a matter of weeks. Even ubuntu will break stuff more often
than not when crossgrading from 'major' versions.

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jstimpfle
On a tangential note, I don't like how I get served the German version of the
site with no obvious way to get the "canonical" one. And then I hate realizing
how hard it is to combine support of multiple languages and still making
everything transparent and accessible.

And also, what a huge effort it is to translate pages to different languages
while (I think) almost everyone wants to read the English version.

~~~
kk_cz
This is determined by the settings in your browser. If you don't like getting
German version as default, then change your browser config.

Not only you have links to different languages in the bottom of the site, you
can even find a link to document describing how the standards works and how to
change the settings in bunch of different browsers:
[https://www.debian.org/intro/cn](https://www.debian.org/intro/cn)

~~~
scrollaway
And yet, a bunch of sites including Google don't give a rat's arse about the
accept-language http header and do their own thing.

Wherever I travel, I get search results served in that language even though I
have my browser consistently configured to want English.

~~~
kk_cz
I agree that in general the support might be better, but for me Google works
as expected at least in my current location (Czech Republic).

If I set preferred language to Czech I get search form in Czech. After
changing settings to English I get English search form (with link to the Czech
version underneath the search bar). Just for fun I have also tried Dutch and
it seems to work as well (there are some foreign words, but I don't speak
Dutch so it might as well be Klingon).

Tested in Firefox and in newly opened private Window, so logon / previous
sessions wouldn't affect the results.

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partycoder
A curious fact is that Debian name their releases after Toy Story characters.

Debian experimental is permanently named "sid" (the kid that breaks toys) and
"stretch" (Debian 9) is a rubber octopus from Toy Story 3.

[https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-
releas...](https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-
releases.en.html)

[https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#Which_Toy_Story_chara...](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#Which_Toy_Story_character_is_Sid.3F)

Other curious fact about Debian, is that there are 2 logos: the open use one,
and the restricted use one. The restricted use one is a less known and
includes a bottle.

~~~
samueloph
I always like to point out the other two logos[1][2] that prefaced the buzz
lightyears chin logo[3].

[1][http://ianmurdock.debian.net/index.html%3Fp=1880.html](http://ianmurdock.debian.net/index.html%3Fp=1880.html)

[2]see "old logo" at
[https://www.debian.org/vote/1999](https://www.debian.org/vote/1999)

[3][https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/81x4CGvFvNL...](https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/81x4CGvFvNL._SL1500_.jpg/vote_0004)

~~~
smcl
I get an error for image 3 - what is the logo?

~~~
samueloph
Sorry, its not really the logo, i was kidding with the fact that the current
logo looks like buzzlightyear's chin.

~~~
smcl
Ahhhhhh I never noticed the swirl on Buzz' chin before!

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chj
I wish Debian would adopt Ubuntu-like versioning number: "yy.mm". So easy to
understand. Another good example is TeXLive, which simply uses "yyyy". Much
better.

~~~
vacri
Ubuntu has made the commitment for 6-month releases, so that makes sense for
them. Debian releases "are ready when they're ready", so they can't predict
the month (or even the year) ahead of time, and the version number is needed
well before the release is made official.

~~~
rlpb
...and the version number is needed well before the release is made official.

Ubuntu developer here. No, the version number is not needed before the
release. All our infrastructure only uses the codename until release, since
the final version name is not known for certain in advance.

For example, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) was released late.

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bovermyer
Does Debian have the same support for AWS eccentricities that Ubuntu now does?

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lamby
Can you elaborate?

~~~
bovermyer
Up until March of this year, the Ubuntu kernel was not tuned for AWS. This
included not having support for Elastic Network Adapter, which limited network
speeds when compared to Amazon Linux.

See here: [https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/ubuntu-on-aws-gets-
se...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/ubuntu-on-aws-gets-serious-
performance-boost-with-aws-tuned-kernel/)

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marmaduke
I have the impression that Jessie came out recently. Is time speeding up?

Meanwhile I’m happy on CentOS 7 since many years now.

~~~
jmiserez
> _Is time speeding up?_

I ask myself that every day, certainly seems like it getting older ;-)

On a more serious note: It’s great that Linux is now sufficiently mature that
even a 3 year old release is perfectly adequate and can do pretty much
whatever you need. Maybe I’m misremembering here, but it didn’t always used to
be like that.

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BackToSchool
Will it work on AMD promontory chipsets?

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freddref
Time to upgrade my laptop

