On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 09:45:03AM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 2/3/21 7:52 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> >... I'm thinking about
> >abandoning 25 years of Redhat experience and switching to
> >Debian, while my aging brain can still handle change.
> >...
> >So - who else is contemplating a move to Debian?
> 
> 
> [lowen] I am.
>

Lowen - thank you for your excellent write up. I am puzzled by a couple
of things and I have a few comments:

- you say good words about professionalism and make good noises
about the high quality of Debian, but you do not elaborate why
you think Ubuntu is lacking in this department.

- you illustrate nicely the problem of linux - half the people worry
about choosing the right linux for their personal laptop (to be groomed
to perfection) and half the people need a linux to run 10-20 computers
used by other people with requirements of minimum maintenance and
maximum uptime. The same linux is not the right linux for both uses!

- professionalism of Debian was recently put into the spotlight
as they re-voted to re-confirm their commitment to systemd (the issue
was that systemd prevented use of some other packages that some
people felt they should have the freedom to use. they were voted down).
check it out and make your own conclusions.

- "feature parity" of all Linuxes is nicely illustrated. I think one
would write pretty much the same report about migrating to BSD
or MacOS - all opensource packages are available pretty much on
all platforms, including Windows.

> 4.) Speaking of Altera.... Quartus II version 13.0sp1 (NOT version
> 13.1!) for MAX7000 CPLD and Cyclone II/IV/V FPGA development.  The
> simulation tools are substantially different between Quartus 9 and
> 13.0sp1 for the MAX7000, and I have projects in both versions.  This
> was also a bit of a challenge, as I had to hand-build and install an
> older version of libpng to get it to run.

- yes, this is a battle. we have and we use Cyclone-1 FPGA boards,
so running old versions of Quartus is a must. I am impressed
that quartus 13.0sp1 can be made to run on current debian/ubuntu
only "with little blood". Intel have now dropped support for even more FPGAs
from the current quartus, so it looks like we will be battling
this forever. (Our hardware guys are grumbling about switching
to Xilinx, there is some unhappiness about Altera FPGAs...)


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada