A grave bug has been introduced into the "wine" package of Debian Jessie, just days before the November 5th freeze deadline. The /usr/bin/wine launch script fails with an "error: unable to find wine executable. this shouldn't happen." message.
Debian has already suffered much unrest lately over the inclusion of systemd, with threats of a fork being issued, along with the possible cancellation of the GNU/kFreeBSD port and the possible dropping of support for the SPARC architecture. After so much strife and disruption, can Debian afford to have such a serious bug affect such a critical package so soon before such a major freeze?
(Score: 3, Informative) by melikamp on Saturday October 25 2014, @03:43PM
In some respects, Slackware release is more modern than Debian stable, and has been for a while. The kernel, for example, is newer. So calling Slackware 14.1 an "ancient relic" requires some explaining, at the very least.
However, Slackware won't appeal to many users, and it is not intended to. Aficionados praise it for very simple design (nearly all configuration residing in text files), very simple and flexible package management (no dependency checking), and the general tendency to stay out of the user's way. It is perfect for learning how to administer a modern GNU+Linux OS, and it is much loved by admins who desire complete control over the OS behavior. An average user, however, will be completely put off by the sheer amount of reading required to do basic things like enabling server daemons and installing additional software.
If you are not afraid to pop the hood and get your hands dirty, definitely give it a try.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @03:47PM
If I were to install the most recent version of Slackware Linux available today, how much effort and configuration would it take before I got a fully working system, including at least one of the major desktop environments?
It takes just a few minutes and almost no effort when using Debian or Ubuntu. It's just a few mouse clicks and the system is usable.
I know it wasn't that simple the last time I tried Slackware, but that was many years ago. I remember having to edit config files, having to start X manually, and all sorts of unfriendliness like that.
What's the current situation?
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:11PM