Debian

27 May 2022 software, distro, email, linux, debian

I did it, I killed my last OpenSuse system yesterday! What happened? I was so happy! Two things. First: I updated my stable systems too early to the 15.4 beta. An issue, which was not resolved after a month, again perhaps Wayland related, annoyed me so much that I did the unthinkable: I switch to Debian stable! Wuuuuutt? Yes. And it’s great! Kernel 5.10 is pretty recent, it’s rock steady so far (3 machines for a week or two, three, moved the rest yesterday). Second issue was that on the Tumbleweed systems (which did not have the video/Wayland problem) I noticed very frequent and significant slowdowns. Thunderbird would take 30 second to load. And consistently so. No, it wasn’t the Flatpak version, it was the bog-standard rpm straight from the OpenSuse repos. I decided I like Debian so much, it’s now on all my systems. Stable even! We’ll see how long that lasts on my work laptop.

One nice thing is that KMail and Kontact now work again. We’ll see for how long, but I set them up and I can see my mails. (For as long as I used OpenSuse, the mail view, which I think is an HTML widget, would show blank. Interestingly, that widget did not work in any KDE application; Akregator wouldn’t show any SSH feed bodys either.) Another nice thing is fast boots again, fast like Fedora really. For some reason Opensuse took 20-30 seconds.

So, as we know, Debian Stable releases last for about 2-3 years. At the tail end of that range, software from the repos can become stale. When winter comes, I’ll be curious how much of a bother that will be.