Debian used to be so good. What happened!? - eviltoast

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do they even need busybox if the base install already comes with full gnu coreutils? I remember Debian as the distro that Just Wroks™, when did it all go so wrong? Is anyone else here having similar issues, or am I doing something wrong?

  • Suzune@ani.social
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    5 months ago

    Stable is for servers, unstable for desktop. It has worked for 20 years. I actually installed two further Debian workstations recently after trying and failing with Kubuntu. So … no, I don’t have this problem.

    No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs? Sometimes it’s nice that Linux boots up and offers an environment to fix stuff while some modules are broken.

    • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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      5 months ago

      Busybox is used in the initramfs normally. It’s the shell used by any scripts in that early stage, as well as the fallback shell environment.

    • renzev@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs?

      I cannot for the life of me find the particular fix I followed, but I swear it was a missing symlink to busybox. Not in initramfs, but in the full booted environment. That’s why I was so confused haha. I can’t find anything about it right now, so maybe I’m misremembering something…