Comment by avhception
7 hours ago
Well, as a user of one of the more "IKEAesque" distros, I guess I have made my choice ;)
And that's perfectly fine, it just means I don't align with Debian on this one. And that freedom is what Linux is all about, I guess. So it seems it's working as intended :)
Edit: And I totally get that users might often want that kind of maximalism. It's just not for me. Although starting network daemons by default might sometimes be a bridge too far, or the case described in the article here.
While I'll argue that Debian's network daemons come with very sane defaults and an accompanying AppArmor profile to prevent both network disruptions and attack surface increases, I'm certainly not with the developer of StarDict. That thing smells malicious.
...and this is what Debian Testing is actually for. To catch these types of issues.
Of course, people are free to select what they resonates with them. I'm not against more DIY distributions (I'm also contemplating using a LFS VM to explore things even further, but time is an issue), and I'm not against your personal choices. I just wanted to note the tension, and share my observations about Debian.