I feel bad about this, but I'm breaking up with you. I've been using Debian for 20 years and in that time I've never strayed to other distributions. But Buster is too much.
Today I logged in to my laptop and the CPU was running flat out, as was the network. So I looked, and it was packagekitd. So, I disabled and stopped it using systemd. Then I logged out and logged back in again. The same happened. And it was still packagekitd. Why? How is this even possible?. Why had disabling it with systemd not disabled it? Maybe I could uninstall it? No, Gnome depends on it. Oh, Gnome. I wasn't that impressed with Gnome 3 back in the day but I didn't want to hate it so I gave it a chance. Even when it was pretty flaky, and everyone, even Linus, was dumping on it. I learned to like the new interface. Except for the bits that I had to use dconf-editor to fix. Or gconf-editor. I didn't mind gnome-tweak- tool or that other settings tool that doesn't seem to have a real name: the one with the wrench and screwdriver logo. Why are there so many different ways to manage things under Gnome? And why do the names of gnome options keep changing? And the names of the tools to tweak them? And why do defaults keep changing? And why does window-shading no longer work in so many gnome apps? Maybe Linus was right about it. Debian used to be an OS for geeks. For people who weren't afraid of the command-line and who could figure out how to tweak configuration files. Stuff that used to be an easy configuration option is now really difficult or is managed by an apparently unconfigurable and poorly documented abstraction layer. Like pulseaudio. I didn't want to hate pulseaudio but the other week, when I wanted to tweak the surround sound options and google told me which alsa configuration file I had to tweak, I discovered that pulseaudio had abstracted it away. And even google doesn't know how to configure pulseaudio. I didn't want to hate wpa_supplicant but when it failed to connect to my second network, it automatically logged back into my first. Even when I tried to tell it not to. Even when I cancelled the attempt. Even when I told it to connect to the other network. I played with a BSD installation the other week. For wireless networking to work, I had to write a script. I almost cried with joy. It was the Unix experience I'd forgotten. The ability to tell a computer what to do, simply, and without having to fight it. Without having to second-guess it. Without it having so much bloody attitude that it appeared to think that it knew best and that I was being unreasonable. I didn't want to hate systemd but stuff that had worked forever, like restarting gdm from the command line, hasn't worked for me since systemd appeared. And what used to be a simple matter of creating a service by creating a script and putting in a symlink into a runlevel directory, is now apparently beyond my level of skill to make work. And binary logs and a "smart" viewer for them? If you want to make logs flexible, log stuff to a sql database. But only as an option, not by default. Don't make the log system a point of failure. Don't take away my ability to use grep on a file. Or awk, or perl, or a script. That is the essence of Unix and it's being lost. Oh, and X11 forwarding no longer works. I didn't want to hate Wayland... Do you really think this is progress? Removing and making difficult to access, all of Unix' power and flexibility, and dumbing it down so that the easy stuff becomes easier but the power-user stuff becomes harder and harder to access and scripting is no longer a matter of telling the machine what to do, but rather figuring out how to work-around all of the improvements. I know I could probably get past all of this. I could learn the intricacies of systemd. I could figure out pulseaudio by looking at the code. I could probably install something other than wpa_supplicant, or I could write my own replacement. I could choose not to use Wayland, and I could use Cinnamon or Mate rather than Gnome 3. Yes, I know Debian has that flexibility. But I don't need the hassle. I want a system that pretty much works out of the box. I don't mind tweaking a few things but I want a tool, not a challenge. So we're done. I feel bad, like I'm being disloyal but I can't go on like this. I wish you well and I hope you find someone else. __ Marc
