Debian: A Brief Retrospective

IanMurdock writes "This weekend, Debian turned 10. To mark the occasion, I've written a retrospective, published at LinuxPlanet. There's also a very nice piece, based in part on my early writings about Debian as well as the retrospective, at internetnews.com."

Comments

My favorite computing experience ever.

[niko9]

I'm nowhere being a linux guru, and I'm sure there will be the usual Debian trolls, but after getting through the initial Debian installation as a new Linux user, it has been one of the most satisfying computing experiences I have had in a long time.

It still boggles my mind that my Thinkpad has been running the same initial installation for the last 2 years, without so much as a hiccup.

Everyday I appreciate all the hard (volunteer no less) that has gone into this hodgepodge of kernels and free software that I can use as I see fit.

My thanks to all the persons that make Debian what it is.

Nice article

[__aavhli5779]

It reminded me of many of the reasons I chose Debian as my first Linux distribution (I'm with Red Hat now but that's more a matter of convenience than philosophy)

Debian still stands out as the distro most reflective of the GNU philosophy. Its packaging system is possibly one of the best uses of the GNU development toolchain I've seen, and its division of software between 'free' and 'non-free' in dselect is yet another example that this is the GNU distro.

I must admit, the project seems to be languishing a bit right now in terms of usage; some of this I blame on the lack of availability of the latest unstable packages (Debian seems to be quite conservative as far as this goes, going so far as to use the 2.2 kernel as its default install option). I also wonder whether the success of more commercial distros has to do with the inclusion of non-free software (especially in the form of drivers) and tools that are contrary to the GNU philosphy, yet more in tune with the needs of business users.

Regardless of the fact that I am no longer using Debian, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks for all your hard work.

Re:Debian is rapidly becoming obsolete

[Just Some Guy]

The Debian community is notoriously snob-like, and hates the idea of newbies (aka regular people) using their distribution.

I think you're thinking of something else. Seriously, I've been on the debian-users mailing list for a long time, and it's made up almost exclusively of nice, outgoing, helpful people. I've never seen a newbie with a legitimate question get an RTFM from the regulars. Sometimes you'll see stupid questions like "y isn't debyan as cool as red hat?" get flamed, but you'll see that anywhere.