Debian And The Rise of Linux

There's an article in this month's LinMagAu that asks a question about how the rise of Linux will impact Debian and what that could mean. Good article, especially interesting if you have been a fan of Debian.

Comments

/.'d

[@madeus]

Oh great *three* posts and it's already /.'d.

Grrr.

Slashdotted already

[Anonymous Coward]

Early 2004 is going to be make-or-break time for Debian.

In mid 2003 public awareness of Linux is passing critical mass, moving beyond the technically competent early adopters and reaching for the desktop of Joe User. Linux is not limited any more to those who can read source code as easily as the Sunday paper. The new breed of user doesn't even know what source code is. Deployments aren't just happening in bedrooms and uni computer labs, they're happening on the scale of tens of thousands of desktops at a time in governments and large corporates. In much the same way as the Internet went through a gestation period before blasting seemingly overnight into the public consciousness, Linux is just now exploding in the awareness of Joe User.

By mid 2004 at the latest Linux will be a serious contender on the average desktop. The downfall of Windows won't be imminent (that will take another couple of years at least) but Linux will begin to take a serious chunk of the market. Kids will be doing their homework with it, Moms and Pops will be doing Internet banking and sending email to Aunt Edna with it, secretaries will be drafting letters with it, accountants will be creating spreadsheets with it.

But will Debian be there?

We all know that Debian is technically one of the most advanced operating systems on the planet, but is it ready to ride the coming shockwave of the desktop Linux juggernaught?

And just as importantly, do we want it to?

Yes, I know the argument that says Debian is created for the benefit of the people who do the creating, and that we shouldn't care if anyone outside the core developer group uses it or not.

I think that argument is bunk.

I say we should want Debian to grow with Linux, because if it doesn't, it's doomed. Doomed to be marginalised in an increasingly Linux-aware market, and doomed to be eclipsed technically by development efforts focused on the high profile commercial distros.

This point was really driven home to me last week when on two consecutive days I was asked for instructions on setting up Apt-cacher under Red Hat. The requests came from people who manage networks of Red Hat boxes using Apt-rpm, and naturally they wanted to cache packages to save some bandwidth. Apt-rpm and Apt-cacher were exactly the solution they needed.

So a Debian initiative saved the day for some Red Hat users. Sweet.

But now the most frequently cited technical advantage of Debian is gone, assimilated by the highest profile commercial distro. Now when people are discussing switching to Linux, there is no longer the argument that Debian is worth the pain of the initial install and the lack of general vendor support in order to reap the benefit of the most advanced package management system in the world. Instead, users can just install Red Hat and still get the benefits of Apt.

Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not. It's the way things are meant to work in the Open Source world. Good ideas and good software get around, and a fundamental part of the Debian credo is that we don't restrict who can benefit from it, no matter what their application. That's a principle I firmly believe in.

And of course I'm glossing over the situation a bit here: I can imagine Debian developers all around the world jumping up and down and yelling that Debian is much more than a bunch of packages, or a technical specification for how to create them, or a tool to manage them. But I'm deliberately simplifying things because that's the way the average Joe User is going to see it: "Oh, Red Hat has Apt now, cool. I'll use that instead of Debian."

Joe User doesn't know (or care) about the obsessive backporting of security patches to the stable release, or about the technical and social infrastructure and numerous supporting apps built up around Dpkg and Apt, or Debian's devotion to the purity of truly Open Source licences. As far as Joe User is concerned Redhat has Apt, and that's all there is to it. They don't know enough to ma

Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo

Debian - the perfect technical basis. (forever ;)

[kompiluj]

Even if Debian will not be the desktop distribution of the future, surely there will be many distributions basing on Debian and adding some functionality to it.
One of such excellent distributions is Knoppix Live on CD distribution, which is one-CD linux able to run on almost any hardware in the universe. It runs even on machines on which RedHat and SuSE cannot (I have seen such!). The heart of Knoppix is its fantastic hardware-auto-configurator.
Debian is the base for Knoppix because it is very stable and has clear config files.
I think that the Debian community should put Debian forward as a reference system and a potential basis for other fine-tuned distros.