Trisquel 6.0 'Toutatis' Is Now Available 109
New submitter ikhider writes "Trisquel, a 'libre' version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux, is now available for download and install (or update for those who already have it). It's one of the easiest 'libre' versions of Gnu/Linux to install and run. This version includes: Linux-Libre 3.2, Xorg, Abrowser 19 (a Firefox derivative that does not recommend non-free software), GNOME 3.4, and LibreOffice 3.5. They're also simplifying their release schedule: 'This release is a Long Term Support one, meaning that bugfix and security updates will be published until 2017. Along with this we have decided to change our release schedule from this point on: we will no longer publish short term support versions every 6 months, but focus on giving the best possible support to the LTS release, providing backported improvements to core packages like the kernel, the browser and the xorg server among others.'"
Why not just base it off Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't get all the Ubuntu spin-offs. Canonical is obviously going far, far away from what these spinoffs are doing - why not just use Debian as the base distribution instead of Ubuntu, which is based on Debian itself?
Re:Why not just base it off Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because, despite things like Unity, Canonical actually does a lot of good work to fix up a lot of little problems in Debian. It's simply easier for Trisquel and others to rip out Unity than it is to fix up sid.
Trisquel doesn't make sense to me (Score:2, Interesting)
The purpose of this distro is for FOSS fans. They want something completely free. So they base the distro off of Ubuntu one of the least Libre of all the distros out there. Canonical, especially lately, has been moving away from GNU/Linux and moving towards Ubuntu/Linux. They really have been suffering from NIH(Not Invented Here) syndrome and have been working against the rest of the community. Especially with Mir, which is causing a lot of unnecessary and harmful fragmentation. If you want to make a free libre distro, why not base it off of Debian or Fedora? At-least Red Hat contributes what they do back to the community at large. Canonical doesn't contribute much at all back to the rest of the world. Especially with their own licencing agreement.
Re:Why not just base it off Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare this with Ubuntu - based on Debian unstable - which is both up-to-date and stable
Hah. I'll contain my laughter.
Canonical releases are rarely what I would call *stable*. They're full of issues both small and large and mixing packages from outside of their main repo can quickly destabilize what you do have.
Debian sid sometimes has *package dependency issues* or regressions, but that's where its "unstable" moniker stops applying. Debian policy leads to Debian stability and which archive you pull from doesn't matter much. To get something that might be broken in Debian, other than install-time difficulty due to mismatched dependency information, you usually need to go to experimental. If you're not familiar with it that's *good*, because it's not for you.
Ubuntu is poorly put together and less reliable than Debian. Anyone who's familiar with Debian from a sysadmin point of view will probably be able to confirm this for you. The only reasons Ubuntu gets away with it are (1) its users don't do much with their computers, and (2) after 6 months you dist-upgrade, so problems from the last release go away and get replaced by problems from the new release. It's all terribly slipshod and amateurish.
Re:Debian 7.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just run Debian?
The problem with Debian is that it recommends non-free software with its non-free and contrib repositories. That means that the user might be tricked into running software that does not honor the user's freedom. That is considered non-ethical.
What are the users - complete illiterates, that they can't read that certain software is 'non-free' and therefore not download it? Debian recognizes that for some software, particularly drivers, the liberated software may not cover it, so they provide the 'non-free' as an option. RMS thinks that people should deliberately be not told that these alternatives - actually supplements - exist, and since Debian doesn't do what he wants, he avoids endorsing them either. That's part of why the 'Libre-Linux' sub-movement exists.