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Add systemd rants here, if you must.

Yes, systemd is there in the schedule:
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/304/systemd-how-we-survived-jessie-and-how-we-will-break-stretch/
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/305/your-systemd-tool-box-dissecting-and-debugging-boot-and-services/

I guess it will be a while before we see that kind of conference with devuan.

Otherwise: thanks a lot to Debian for an environment that has been a joy
to work with for a long time. My personal server is still running Debian, but
I for one most probably won't be joining the systemd bandwagon.

Add systemd rants here, if you must.

Yes, systemd is there in the schedule:
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/304/systemd-how-we-survived-jessie-and-how-we-will-break-stretch/
https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/305/your-systemd-tool-box-dissecting-and-debugging-boot-and-services/

I guess it will be a while before we see that kind of conference with devuan.

Otherwise: thanks a lot to Debian for an environment that has been a joy
to work with for a long time. My personal server is still running Debian, but
I for one most probably won't be joining the systemd bandwagon.

Interesting thing you mention. Well, our migration was prompted by some theoretical advances; if you look at our slides at DebConf14 you will see some references to papers presented at the EuroCrypt 2012 conference talking about the relative strengths of different keys.

I don't contest that Zimmerman and Koch know how to communicate securely and what it takes, but maybe we are talking about a different threat model. One thing is identity assurance just for the sake of identity assurance, but in Debian we use it as a core infrastructural part: Get hold of my GPG key, and you have potential root access to thousands of computers. Of course, there are human checks in place, and it's quite unlikely you'd get away with yours... But it's possible.

I suppose that it's long past time that I installed Debian. I've fought through Gentoo army of config files, gone through RPM hell with Red Hat and Mandrake, hacked at the jungle thicket of Fedora and swam in the cool waters of Arch. I've tried two Debian-based distributions, but never install Debian. Does it offer any real advantage over Arch?

Just recently I tried the top 25 free software distributions [as measured by distrowatch.com], one of which was Arch. I have to say Arch was one of the distros I found fun to play with -- the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer. The first set of instructions I found on the Arch website weren't complete concerning the Grub2 install, leading to install and bootup failures, but the "Beginner's Guide" has complete instrcutions for the install. Package installation under arch is super fast. I couldn't get audio working in the VM I was installing it in, but other than that I really liked it.

And I tried Gentoo as well, and I found it just as hateful as I found it in 2003, if not more so. The "install", or shoud I say the compile, took three solid days to install a base system + a base install of KDE 4.8. The 'emerge' command often ran into dependency hell, forcing the use of several switches like 'emerge --newuser --update --deep (package)'. Anytime the USE flags get updated Gentoo wants you to 'emerge @world' to recompile the whole system again, and of course the instructions for intalling KDE4 has you modify the USE flags. I really do love a lot of the documentation I can get from the Gentoo project, but in terms of running it as a distro I want to keep it as far away from me as I can, because frankly I think it's insane.

Debian has a graphical installer, and you can choose several Desktop Environments right at the very start of the install menu. I think it's the only distro (or one of very few) that shows all of the choices of languages in their own native written language rather than the list being all in English. Debian is also the basis for a long list of other distros -- out of the top 25, 12 are Debian derivatives. IMHO the best feature Debian has is the ability to upgrade-in-place -- so you never have to do a reinstall to keep it up-to-date unless you want to. Debian has a lot of developer support behind the project, most of whom are free software purists -- which is generally a good thing. It's one of the very few distros that are based solely on donations and have no private corporation behind them. If you want to know more about Debian, my first suggestion is to watch an intro video given by Bdale Garbee from DebConf11 which I think was well spoken and informative:
        http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/804.en.html

I don't know enough about Arch to give a fair comparison between it and Debian; all I can say for the moment is that I've been running Debian for 13 years, and that in the very limited time I've spent with Arch I've been impressed with it.

The distributions I liked in testing them: Linux Mint Debian, Fedora 17, openSuSE, Debian, Arch, Pear Linux 5 (appearance of Mac OS X), SnowLinux 2 "Ice", and the DVD version of Knoppix 7.03. Distros I did not like: Ubuntu 12.04 (3D, Unity GUI), Mageia 2, PCLinuxOS (only "rpm" lines in /etc/apt/sources.list), Ultimate 3.4 (3D), Gentoo (insane long compiles), Fuduntu (yucky package installer), SolusOS (yucky package installer).

Sam Hartman and Mario Lang gave a talk and demonstration of accessibility in Debian in 2009, covering various software in Debian (and Windows). Video is linked from the talk page.

They have hosted codesprints and Debconf 2009. So this is really just a continuation of a long time of moving towards Linux. But I do not like the part where he says "Our budget for this is zero euros", that will not go well.

It's not just you; a lot of people are avoiding coming to the U.S. [or even traveling within the U.S.] because of what's going on here.

Last year I had the pleasure of going to the Debian conference at Columbia University -- DebConf10. http://debconf10.debconf.org/ A few people who traveled to the U.S. did get harassed by TSA security; at least one married couple was held overnight and had their laptop confiscated. [There were not many such incidents reported.]

This year, DebConf11 was held in Bosnia. So I had a look at how many people attended. However more people attended DebConf11 in Bosnia than DebConf10 in the U.S. One of the reasons for fewer DebConf10 attendees was because of all the perceived harassment travelers would have to go through, which included American citizens being concerned of this harassment within their own country.

Next year's DebConf12 is going to be in Nicaragua -- and I suspect that conference will have more attendees than the one held in the U.S., too. When Bosnia and Nicaragua are perceived to be safer to travel to than the U.S., you know we've got a problem.

Eben Moglen on taking back control over your data, privacy and freedom in the age of cloud services.

Summary:
- Don't accept any cloud services that come with free spying, free built-in man in the middle attack (Facebook as the worst offender, GMail and many other services mentioned as other examples)
- Thus avoid lock-in, avoid anyone limiting your mobility and freedom, stop being exploited and spied upon.
- Instead of centralized services use P2P (or federated services), protected by strong encryption
- A $29.90 plug-in, power-supply-sized appliance (the "freedom box") providing these services, and much more (VoIP telephony, TOR, etc.) at home.

1. Freedom in the cloud: http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
(talk from February 2010)
2. How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud: http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/641.en.html
(talk from August 2010)

(I wrote this summary back in August 2010, so it's somewhat outdated.)

Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.

That is exactly what Eben Moglen discussed during his presentation at DebConf10. Info on the presentation (including links to video) is available. Also check out Joey Hess' commentary on the presentation. His objective price point is less than one hundred dollars, IIRC.

Look, if anyone just does a basic analysis, you'll see that there's this circular process where the heavier operating system requires new hardware, forcing people to buy both to keep up with the times, which both them and the manufacturer want.

According to this basic analysis(pdf), debian Etch is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than Vista. And yet it doesn't require this "new hardware" you're speaking of.

In fact in addition to the x86-32 and x86-64 targets Vista aims for it also runs on alpha, sparc, arm, powerpc, hppa, ia64, mips and s390. From the toys to spacecraft, from webservers to 85.2% of the world's top 500 supercomputers it'll run on almost anything. That's engineering.

This will not end until they have a solid competitor, period, and that means the linux geeks have got to get off their high horse and make an easy, packaged, "buy your box from dell with it pre-loaded" version of it your grandma can use.

You have been able to buy PCs preloaded with linux from Walmart, Dell, IBM, HP and many others for several years.

Because, personally, i'm getting a little sick of getting these operating systems from Microsoft which I swear to God have code running several extra loops just to bog it down so that only the most bleeding edge (aka money I don't want to spend) boxes can handle it reasonably.

So switch. It's time. Ballmer says Vista is a work in progress. Gates says its replacement is a year out. Let's take their word for it. This is a great window of opportunity to justify looking at alternatives.

The list of talks that should be on the DVD is here.

Actually, Debian developers do more. (approx) 250 Debian Developers have recently (two weeks ago) attended this year's Debian Conference in Mexico. Not everybody hacked all the time (as the pictures proved) but there was quite a bit of it.

Also, even if the main conference is held yearly, there are mini conferences held with fewer people (30-100) in, at least, Australia, Japan and Spain.

Actually, Debian developers do more. (approx) 250 Debian Developers have recently (two weeks ago) attended this year's Debian Conference in Mexico. Not everybody hacked all the time (as the pictures proved) but there was quite a bit of it.

Also, even if the main conference is held yearly, there are mini conferences held with fewer people (30-100) in, at least, Australia, Japan and Spain.

It seems to me that two weeks ago I was in Mexico at DebConf, which if you look at the official page, was preceded by a weeklong "DebCamp" that could just as easily been called a "hackathon," not to mention that probably 60% or more of the average attendee's time during the "main" DebConf week was spent in collaborative hacking. And DebConf had around 250 people there...

I'm not knocking OpenBSD's hackathon, just pointing out that it's hardly unique. Many other FOSS projects have similar gatherings.

It makes you wonder (a) what kind of lunatics are running Debian these days, and (b) whether Debian can hold together as an organisation.

Yeah, and ain't it interesting that this year's DebConf is in Helsinki, Finland, and that it's at least partly sponsored by Nokia...

I'm off to Helsinki for Debconf5 in five weeks myself, and I'm hoping to see if I can lay my grubby little mitts on one of these devicen :-)

We did that at the weekend.

28 more days and you can read almost the same article again: Debian is 10 years old on August 16th

This is your preference. You want an old 15+ years operating system instead of Debian Linux?

What the hell are you talking about? FreeBSD got ten years old last month.

And, for completeness, Debian turns ten years old next month.

This summer there is DebConf coming up in Oslo, Norway for those of you who are interrested. 4-5 days before the conf. there will be a DebCamp, where you can sit outside in your tent, have a hot dog and talk with fellow Debian geeks. More information at:
here and
here