Please do not advise non-experts to use expert tools

[ewx]

I've just spent 3 hours fixing naath's Debian unstable install over IRC; it was a real mess. Anyone who knows much about Debian will tell you that you shouldn't be running unstable if you're not capable of dealing with things breaking, and I quite agree, but apparently someone told her to use unstable.

If I were to bill said someone for my time, what do you think would be a reasonable hourly rate?

Comments

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I always get annoyed with the debian "just use testing|unstable!" people. Although I do run testing on a machine where I need newer stuff, I hate the level of fiddling required.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Quite. Backports usualy keeps people who are running stable, and want The Newer Stuff, quiet.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I think about £100 an hour would be about right — this kind of work requires a lot of skill and knowledge that not many people have, and the periods of employment are short and available at unpredictable time, so you have to build in a big margin.

[emperor]

I think I know who gives out this maladvice, and I've had this argument with them before :(

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

You could reach a pact; he adds "But some people say don't, because, listen to the name, dude!" and you add "But some people say it'll be ok, because [...]" :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

And it *still doesn't work*. I mean, it should not take *three hours* to get from 'omg I fall over and die' to 'I can just about give you GUI' (there is currently no sound, no non-US-QWERTY key maps and a shitty screen resolution).

The cause - oh, I installed vlc. which, you know, is NOT THAT UNUSUAL. Which needed me to update bits of x - obv. that means it's time to *curl up and die*. What else would you do if you were an OS and I tried to update you a bit?

[emperor]

This is one of the reasons why you shouldn't run unstable, of course. Installing things on stable should be doable without having to upgrade other bits of the OS.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not sure. I mean I hadn't updated *anything* for yonks. I wasn't *surprised* that it needed kicking. On the other hand it would be nice if it hadn't wrecked the whole of x.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

This is part of the reasoning why I outright gave up on Debian. Rah, rah, Ubuntu, &c.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

While all my home machines are now Ubuntu, all my work machines still run Debian Stable[0]. Which seems a good compromise to me.

0] Except the debian-mips/debian-mipsel development machines, obviously.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if Naath would be better suited to Ubuntu, though feel a little unsure about recommending it not having actually tried it myself.

[mr-ricarno.livejournal.com]

I use Ubuntu all the time; it's my main workhorse OS. IANA programmer, but it works for me. It has lots of nifty stuff and has only rarely given me problems.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Well, it all Just Worked for me at work using recent commodity hardware. It's a Gnome desktop by default so a bit of a memory hog compared with, say, fvwm, but they've put a lot of effort into making the system easy to configure and use. The hardest part that I recall was setting up sound; that was a case of running lspci, figuring out the correct driver to use and adding that to modules.conf (though there might be a nicer way). Oh, and there's a new revision coming out Real Soon Now...

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

It's a bit more Just Works / Just Doesn't Work in my limited experience. Less of the "it works if you fiddle for ages".

Personally, I run Debian unstable on this laptop, stable at work, and Windows /unstable dual boot on my home destop. Windows for games, and certain other things (most recently bluetooth; hour+ of fiddling in Linux revealed a total disaster area, 5 minutes of windows and I had the addressbook off the phone).

[cjwatson]

I suspect this particular problem is due to Debian unstable being RIGHT in the middle of the enormously huge and painful transition to X.org 7.0. If naath had been following Ubuntu's development branch at the time when we made that same transition, she'd have had exactly the same problem; so I don't think that criticism is particularly fair here.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Perhaps to some extent. But, there's less of a "just run unstable" mentality within Ubuntu unless you're actually developing at the bleeding-edge; it's much more likely that naath would have been running stable and so would be able to take advantage of whatever transition-from-breezy arrangements you folks build in...

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

I think that that depends if they give this advice recklessly; that is, it would depend why they hadn't wound up spending the relevant three hours instead of you.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Becuause they==annoying git and ewx==fluffy boyfriend of course :)

[senji.livejournal.com]

One might ask why one was taking OS advice from annoying gits? :)

[naath.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I must have been out of my mind.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Who is the annoying git, anyway?

[naath.livejournal.com]

Matthew Davison.

Who you proably don' t know.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I think that Debian's history of very slow release cycles meant that lots of people found they had to move to unstable/testing a year or two ago, and the menality has stuck. I moved over to Fedora for machines I didn't have time to / care about enough to spend time fixing / run anything complicated on, and am only now starting to migrate them back. We moved many of the work machines to a bizarre Fedora / apt combination which seems to work really well at keeping our sysadmins content and we're just tentatively creating debian boxes again. It's mainly things like MySQL/PHP/Perl versions and versions of major libraries that tend to hit me/work.

[j4.livejournal.com]

apparently someone told her to use unstable

<mum>If someone told her to put her hand in the fire, would she do it?</mum>