On Feb 2, 2004, at 4:21 PM, Levi Bard wrote:
>>> Yesterday around 15:00 UTC we the host klecker.debian.org crashed.
>>> Unfortunately, it didn't react on the serial console and to a
>>> remotely
>>> issued power-cycle.
>
> Would have been nice if this story was linked from debian.org/News -
> thanks!
>
IMHO, Debian has been getting really sloppy lately. I have seen them
take days or even weeks to issue updates to some pretty serious recent
flaws (some of the recent sendmail problems in particular) and things
like this deal with their website/server going down and just not
mentioning it to anyone.
It seems to me that lately the linux distro "community" has been taking
some pretty big blows. RedHat and SuSE have gone strictly "big time"
commercial and I've heard any number of people complaining about the
teething problems the Fedora spinoff has been having (I don't use it
myself), Debian IMO has really been slipping on the QA and in keeping
anything even vaguely close to current (and no, I don't consider "run
'unstable' on your production box a viable answer to that), who knows
if Mandrake will still be around even two weeks from now with the
number of bizarre financial reports I've seen from them the last few
months... Lindows, well, despite their meager success I still can't
bring myself to count them as anything but a marketing ploy.
On the flip side, gentoo is getting more popular (and whatever happened
with the whole "zynot" thing?) and I've seen a couple newer distros
coming around that seem to be making a pretty sincere effort at taking
over some of the linux market. (Can't think of the names at the
moment.)
But it still seems to be that the linux distro marketplace has pretty
much fragmented into "you're dumb" a-la Lindows and Xandros, "if you
don't have a buttload of money, go away" a-la RedHat and SuSe, and "if
you're not a geek, don't try it" a-la Debian and Gentoo and Slackware.
I will happily admit: I got my hands on a new Apple 15" Powerbook about
three/four months ago and so far, I'm really enjoying it. I've been
using it a lot lately and I guess I've taken a few steps back from my
"hardcore linux" outlook and it's refreshing to have a UNIX-based
system where everything pretty much really does "just work" even if you
do "have to" do it "the apple way" which considering the options, isn't
all that bad. (They do have some good UI people in Cupertino...)
I only hope the various linux factions can get their acts together
because frankly, the future isn't looking so bright to me now.
Compared to two or three years ago where this same fragmentation just
looked like good competition, now it just looks like everyone really
can't figure out what they're trying to accomplish.
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