On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 11:50:45PM +1300, Chris Bannister wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 09:49:10PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:32:38 -0400
> > Ric Moore <wayward4...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 09/27/2014 02:49 PM, lee wrote:
> > >
> > > > Just ask yourself: Why would someone choose to download an ISO for
> > > > Debian?
> > >
> > > For me, it's the safest way to install/upgrade. I have had too many
> > > problems with interrupted live major migration to the next release
> > > level via an upgrade, or a live network total install. Owell, I'm
> > > not huge fan of cloud based services either. :) Ric
> >
> > Yes. I'm a huge believer in wiping and reinstalling major versions.
> > It's like spring cleaning, and I eliminate ghosts of operating systems
> > past.
>
> And then there's the rest of us who run Debian precisely because you
> don't have to reinstall. It's great because you only ever need to
> install once.
+1
On my main workhorse machine [1], I have only ever installed debian
from scratch twice. Initially it was debian potato, which was upgrade
eventually to squeeze. And at some point in the squeeze days it was
re-installed to migrate from 32 to 64 bit. And now wheezy. No serious
problems.
The install has survived changing motherboards, disks, houses, video
cards, cpu failures, and living in 3 different laptops.
It is great to have a linux distribution you can trust to "just work".
I find the quality of the packaging to be a an important factor in the
reliability of the distribution: upgrades generally work without a
hitch. The few times they'd broken on me turned out to be me doing
things I shouldn't have been doing to start with.
In the old days, when moving the disk to different hardware, xorg.conf
changes may have been needed, but that was about it. No re-licensing
or having-to-convince-the-software-i'm-not-a-pirate.
The trick to this appears to have several key elements:
* choice of distribution. Debian, Obviously. Rock stable. May not be
the newest, but the most reliable.
* not doing "crazy things", like running backports or
testing/unstable [2], and no grabbing *.debs from weird places.
* Backups.
So in conclusion: A big "thank you" to the Debian Developers. The
stability of the distribution is a direct result of their work.
[1] Yes, I run a fair number of virtual machines which are always
re-built from scratch. Gotta test deployment scripts somewhere.
[2] I have no reservations about running testing/unstable inside a
virtual machine. Those can be thrown away and re-built with a few
keystrokes.
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
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