I am setting up an old laptop dual booting OpenBSD and Debian testing. It’s been several years since I’ve had to do a Debian install, and I will say that the installation procedure, at least when it comes to setting up a fully encrypted Debian installation on AMD64 systems has come a long way since the old days of having to build a chroot and call debootstrap manually.
One of the things that I have noticed for Debian is that many of the things that I find useful to set up on a system now ship with Debian, at least for Debian testing:
- There is a Debian systemd unit for starting an emacs daemon process in the background - you just have to
systemd --user enable emacs.service, log out, and log back in to get a background emacs daemon and then you can emacsclient -n -c with wild abandon
- Installing sbcl with its suggested packages automatically sets up SLIME in emacs -
M-x slime loads without issue and without needing to update your ~/.emacs.d/init.el file
- Debian is now installing Firefox ESR instead of their fucked Iceweasel reskin, so things stay in sync for security updates
The problem with all of this is that there’s no work to do - I don’t have to spend time configuring my environment, and I hate it. I remember that installing and configuring a new Linux system from scratch on Debian used to take me several hours that I quite enjoyed, but now it’s plug and play and I may as well be running Windows. There’s even a Steam package in the non-free repository!
I’m sure this is all good for people that don’t want to spend the time customizing things, and I’m sure it’s good for corporate and enterprise adoption (though most corps probably use Ubuntu since they can pay Canonical if something goes wrong), but I’m a bit taken aback by it all.
The weird part is that I normally use WindowMaker (because GNOME and KDE both blow goats, even Cinnamon and TDE), and all of the above just works with WindowMaker too! lightdm is happy to start a legacy X session with WindowMaker as the default window manager, and systemd user sessions start the gpg-agent, emacs daemon, and pulseaudio daemon. What I used to have (and enjoy!) manually configuring in my .xsession or .xinitrc sessions now just runs and works.
I hate it so much. I can’t wait to hop back over to OpenBSD (which is another rant in and of itself) and actually have fun configuring things.
