After being frustrated with Mint's laggy bloated feel, and enjoying Manjaro for a while, I decided to head back to pure Debian for longer term stability and ease of use.
Wheezy is heading towards oldstable now, but still works very nicely with MATE (backported) or XFCE4. Sure its packages are rather deprecated, but that's no huge concern as that particular machine is 5+ year old hardware anyway.
I decided to boot Jessie in a VM and have a play around, with a view to upgrading my Wheezy install to Jessie/testing after sussing out its changes and improvements. This is mostly because the machine has an SSD and Debian advise a later kernel than is available in Wheezy by default. Plus Jessie is supposedly almost at freeze before moving to stable, which means it's going to provide much more up to date packages over Wheezy while being basically solid by now anyway. In theory...
However, I found that every time I tried to import an .ovpn file via the MATE network manager it crashed (segfault) and the GUI disappeared. This is the same bug that was supposedly addressed in Ubuntu - and later Debian - during 2013/2014, but clearly is still present in Jessie's MATE environment.
Trying KDE instead, I find it imports the .ovpn connections OK and visually confirms it has connected to the VPN server, but actually the routing is unchanged!
Although it says 'connected to VPN xyz' your ISP IP is the only one on show to the internet. Major, major security issue! Cinnamon does the exact same thing as MATE, i.e. segfault.
Only Gnome3 worked as expected out of all the DEs I tested. It imported the .ovpn and connected, and not only was the routing correct, but resolv.conf updated to the VPNs DNS and everything was perfect.
Upon digging around in synaptic to see what might be broken, I noticed the preferences dialog's updates tab asks whether you want to receive updates for just this Ubuntu distro, or also newer updates. Yes you read that right, Ubuntu. The package refers to itself as Ubuntu-synaptic in the titlebar too.
WTH? Jessie is approaching freeze and still has these types of issues? Since when did Debian (upstream) use Ubuntu packages? I'm confused and have a sour taste in my mouth from all these issues. Jessie will be stable soon, God what a mess that'll be.
I sourced the netinstall ISO from Debian directly, and tried a couple of different versions (and selected various different mirrors during the multiple installs) to rule out any errant package mirrors or ISOs. It really just is this way, broken and calling itself Ubuntu. I guess there's some irony there if nothing else.
Google shows nothing, and the only filed bugs are from 2013/14 when the issue first arose. Surely they're not still unfixed after all that time, with Jessie being green-lit for freezing?
Any Debian hardcore users here (or even casual ones) who can comment? I'll hit the main Debian resources tomorrow but just wanted to put out some feelers in the meantime in case I was missing something obvious. Yes, I realise it's called the 'testing' branch but after going through unstable and experimental things shouldn't be this bad, especially approaching a freeze. It's literally unusable, and I still can't work out the Ubuntu references.
Thanks in advance.
Wheezy is heading towards oldstable now, but still works very nicely with MATE (backported) or XFCE4. Sure its packages are rather deprecated, but that's no huge concern as that particular machine is 5+ year old hardware anyway.
I decided to boot Jessie in a VM and have a play around, with a view to upgrading my Wheezy install to Jessie/testing after sussing out its changes and improvements. This is mostly because the machine has an SSD and Debian advise a later kernel than is available in Wheezy by default. Plus Jessie is supposedly almost at freeze before moving to stable, which means it's going to provide much more up to date packages over Wheezy while being basically solid by now anyway. In theory...
However, I found that every time I tried to import an .ovpn file via the MATE network manager it crashed (segfault) and the GUI disappeared. This is the same bug that was supposedly addressed in Ubuntu - and later Debian - during 2013/2014, but clearly is still present in Jessie's MATE environment.
Trying KDE instead, I find it imports the .ovpn connections OK and visually confirms it has connected to the VPN server, but actually the routing is unchanged!
Although it says 'connected to VPN xyz' your ISP IP is the only one on show to the internet. Major, major security issue! Cinnamon does the exact same thing as MATE, i.e. segfault.Only Gnome3 worked as expected out of all the DEs I tested. It imported the .ovpn and connected, and not only was the routing correct, but resolv.conf updated to the VPNs DNS and everything was perfect.
Upon digging around in synaptic to see what might be broken, I noticed the preferences dialog's updates tab asks whether you want to receive updates for just this Ubuntu distro, or also newer updates. Yes you read that right, Ubuntu. The package refers to itself as Ubuntu-synaptic in the titlebar too.
WTH? Jessie is approaching freeze and still has these types of issues? Since when did Debian (upstream) use Ubuntu packages? I'm confused and have a sour taste in my mouth from all these issues. Jessie will be stable soon, God what a mess that'll be.
I sourced the netinstall ISO from Debian directly, and tried a couple of different versions (and selected various different mirrors during the multiple installs) to rule out any errant package mirrors or ISOs. It really just is this way, broken and calling itself Ubuntu. I guess there's some irony there if nothing else.
Google shows nothing, and the only filed bugs are from 2013/14 when the issue first arose. Surely they're not still unfixed after all that time, with Jessie being green-lit for freezing?
Any Debian hardcore users here (or even casual ones) who can comment? I'll hit the main Debian resources tomorrow but just wanted to put out some feelers in the meantime in case I was missing something obvious. Yes, I realise it's called the 'testing' branch but after going through unstable and experimental things shouldn't be this bad, especially approaching a freeze. It's literally unusable, and I still can't work out the Ubuntu references.
Thanks in advance.
