Update available! This version is very old.
Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn’t had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?
tl;dr: people use stable distros like debian and then complain to him when they don’t get feature bugfixes
This is a daily reminder that “stable” means “unchanging” and in no way refers to the quality of the code. It doesn’t mean “won’t fall over”… That’s a different type of stable which debian stable absolutely does not guarantee.
A bug in debian will remain present in debian until the next update a year from now. If the bug breaks your workflow, then find a new workflow or a new distro.
Exactly. Stable basically means, “you can build your entire workflow around this bug, because we guarantee we won’t be fixing it.”
A lot of people don’t know this though. They think it is the “won’t fall over” type. They hear “use debian over ubuntu, because it’s more stable” or “use debian for servers, because it’s more stable” and think it means “You want uptime, so you dont want something crashing”. So when they see a bug, it is concerning to them. A distro focused on not falling over must super care about reducing crashes, and don’t realize the exact opposite is actually true. The bug was fixed a long time ago, but you don’t get it because “don’t change” is more important than “don’t crash”.
If the bug is in a popular package (ie, a super common screensaver) in a very popular distro (and a lot of people have chosen the distro because they think it has less bugs than others), I can imagine the maintainer getting fed up with the bug reports for a bug that was already fixed.
Most people I’ve seen on Lemmy understands that “stable” means “unchanging”… But every person I’ve talked to outside of lemmy, thinks it means “less bugs”. So clearly it’s a very big misunderstanding (Which is basically confirmed by the fact that xscreensaver gets so many invalid bug reports that they felt necessary to do this.)