April 24, 2020

Switching to Debian isn't easy

After experimenting with the Debian 10 operating system in a qemu enviornment, i have decided to install the software on a physcial machine. Unfurtunately, the installation menu was a bit complicated. First thing to mentioned was, that the touchpad wasn't recognized, so all the settings has to be made with the keyboard only.

Second problem was that after the first boot up the display resolution was wrong. Only a vesa mode was shown which was below the normal resolution. After experimenting with different grub settings (none of them are working) the answer was hidden in the debian wiki https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo What the user has to do is to install a non-free AMD graphics driver. After the next bootup the normal display resolution is shown.

It's unclear how other Linux distribution are handling the situation. Perhaps they are installing in the background the non-free package and doesn't ask back. So nice, the resolution is now improved.

One thing which isn't working yet in debian is the edge scroll of the touchpad. It seems that with the new wayland display manager the settings aren't recognized. Perhaps it's possible to find a workaround or in the worst case the touchpad is working below their optimal quality.

Let us describe a unique feature of debian which has to do with installing outdated software. The standard webbrowser in Debian 10 is Firefox 68.7 ESR. In contrast to the normal Firefox software, this version was released in 2019 and then it was improved slightly. So what is the difference? The interesting situation is, that for most users the ESR version makes more sense. The story told in the version history looks predicatable. That means, a year ago the software was programmed, and then it was improved by security updates.

Now it is possible to compare this story with the trunk branch of Firefox and Chrome. In the trunk branch the story is, that the user has to check twice a week for an update, and if an improvement is available he has to install the latest version of Chrome within 24 hours, otherwise the system becomes vulnarable to attacks. Or let me tell the story a bit different. Suppose a user has installed the latest Chrome browser and hasn't updated the software since a week. From the perspective of the Chrome development team, the user has made something wrong. He was adviced to check for updates twice a week, he wasn't doing so, and as a result the user has made mistake.

Rolling release webbrowser are blaming the user if the system becomes vulnarable. In contrast, Longterm versions like Firefox ESR are blaming the upstream. That means, if something with the Firefox 68 ESR is wrong it's up to mozilla to fix the issue. And if Mozilla isn't able to fix the problem, the next question is why does a certain compoenent was introduced in the ESR version which needs so frequenetly an update?

Touchpad in XFCE4

After playing around with a different display manager the problem with the edge scrolling has been solved. In XFCE4 the touchpad can be configured differently than in gnome. Which allows to even scroll the content on the screen with the touchpad itself.