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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."
What do I think Debian should do next? As the Linux world's leading non-commercial, community-driven distribution, Debian can lead the way in preserving the fragile Linux ecosystem, if it sets its mind to it.
.02
Debian is NOT going to preserve anything. If it continues on its current path (which is fine for me as I am a Debian user) it will find that it is cornered it its own niche.
The rest of the Linux community is moving FORWARD towards the mainstream. Debian remains locked in its "old fashioned ways" and will never be a leader in anything (as far as the MAJORITY will be concerned).
People want ease of use, ease of installation, and commercial applications to be included. They don't want to have to find them somewhere else, manually add a deb repository, and then install.
I have to say that I am nearly 100% pleased with Debian. That's not to say that is what is going to matter in the future. I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.
That's my worthless
It kind of sucks to read about all the great ideas and ideals that Debian represents and then get a dose of the real Debian community in #debian.
I still consider myself somewhat of a linux newbie, but I've learned as much as I need to manage a few small servers.
My day job is selling medical equipment on the internet but I'm also the "computer guy" for the company I work at. Which btw has the added benefit of some extra job security, because no one else knows how to fix the network when it breaks.
I started tinkering with RedHat and Mandrake about 3 years ago, and have recently installed Debian on a little backup server we have here at work. What a breath of fresh air! I am so glad to be out of RPM hell - those of you who have tried it know how frustrating it is to try and install an RPM, only to find out that you need files A, B, and C to make it work. Then you find out A, B, and C need X, Y, and Z, etc. etc. and that eventually you need an entirely new kernel. You can spend hours trying to fuss with those dependencies. Ugh.
Now with debian it's as simple as:
apt-get install whatever
and bam, you're done! It's awesome! I had a backup server with trouble ticket system up and running in my office here within a few hours (and probably would have been faster if I was more expert).
The Debian apt system is simply awesome, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a stable, easy to maintain linux box.
and is still only on version 3. Stable as all hell but always a step behind IMO.
All my Slash test boxes, including the laptop I'm typing on, run Debian.
Thanks to everyone involved who puts together and maintains the distro. Its package management is top-notch. Excellent work y'all.
Sure, if you want incredibly stable free software, Debian stable is the way to go.
But if you're an average Linux user, forget about trying to get Debian stable to work on any hardware put out in the past year and a half. And also forget about having the features you need for an adequate personal computer experience available in Debian's package management system.
Oh, and forget about getting any help from the Debian community. Especially if you're a Linux newbie, or just someone with a few gaps in their knowledge of Linux. The Debian community is notoriously snob-like, and hates the idea of newbies (aka regular people) using their distribution.
I used Debian for a year, but I just couldn't get it to work to my standards within the package management system.
So... I started using Gentoo. Great community, great package management, very easy to use (once you get past the installation process...), and I can get it to do everything I need with only a few commands... instead of doing vi voodoo on mysterious config files and downloading 3rd party packages just to watch a freakin' movie file.
Debian turned 10. I bet that's their percentage of user retention as well.
Debian _is_ easy to use.
Just hard to install =)
The FSF doesn't recommend carrot cake, drinking beer, or ironing your underpants either. But it wouldn't be fair to reword that as suggesting they're recommending you don't eat carrot cake, drink beer, or iron your underpants.
I like staying away from the current direction that Linux is moving but I don't believe that the rest of the community necessarily believes that's the best way to go.
When people talk about where Linux is going like it's a bus (or bandwagon) I get confused. Who says Debian should be the Linux platform for mainstream commercial apps when MS is overthrown? (If any of that happens; I'm not saying it will.)
Talking about "the Linux community" is like trying to talk about "the Slashdot community"...people try to assign consensus opinions to each group but obviously there is none.
Linux is a kernel, not a movement.
Actually, that's not true anymore. Things have changed and Debian is not the best example of free software or GNU. Check out GNU/Linex instead.
You'll not see a link to Debian from the FSF/GNU sites for this reason.
You mean, like the one on this page, found by following "Links to other sites" from the main page?
I've tried most of the Linux distros out there... Slackware still remains on my notebook and on my servers.
Why?
When it comes right down to it, there is just nothing simple and straightforward like a distribution that doesn't pretend to know more than you do. Dependency tracking simply is not that big of a deal. If I try to run something and I miss a dep, what comes up?
Windows'll do the exact same thing, and if you're even partially trained on a computer you will know what's wrong and at least be able to bug someone to help you fix it. RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, TurboLinux... they all make life difficult if you try to do something the packager doesn't like and if a package doesn't exist for the program you want, you end up keeping track of dependencies in your head anyway.
Debian's especially bad with regards to the stable/unstable trees. Stable's too old and unchanging (which is what it is meant for, so it's not really a fault), while unstable always seems to have package problems which leads you back to dependency hell. Add to it that dpkg and dselect and whatever that newer, "friendlier" package system is called are all difficult to use and you end up with the worst of both worlds.
Sure you can use something like CheckInstall to make your own packages but then you screw up the Debian way unless you're willing to replace practically every occurance of "Linux" with "GNU/Linux" and move various runtime files to where Debian wants them and then maintain said diff. Slackware on the other hand doesn't seem to care, and its package manager is dead simple to boot. Installing, upgrading and removing packages is painless and as I said, if you screw up the deps you get slightly cryptic but not impossible to decypher errors.
If I were to throw out a distribution name for my mom / grandma / whatever, it'd be SuSE. The support's great, the distro is solid and it seems to just be overall easier than any of the other "easy" distros. Debian's politics and packager pissed me off sufficiently to leave it behind.
the only thing keeping debian from being another faceless OS out there is its packaging system and stability record. however, the cost of stability comes at lack of updated software. so you end up downloading the non-stable software anyways, so, what's the point of that? only thing that makes it truly great is the apt-get system. its packaging system is much nicer than RPM.. personally I dislike rpm. it's stingy and sometimes more complicated than it should be.. with debian's system it's like, when you select source, you get the damn source code, you dont get a package that you edit files in then rebuild and then install. personally, if opensource wants to free people from microsoft matrix, they gotta appeal to these users, for some people in opnsource, this is a daunting task becuase they cant go below their level of experience, so what you gotta do is test various systems with certain points that offer the greatest ease.. apt-get would be perfect as the dominant packaging system in most linux distros. an installer much like slackware's would make the almost perfect install (blue linux has a nice easy to understand installer as well) things like that are what are going to make the next revolutionary distro. debian is antiquated in many ways. most people I know get it for either 2 things: to be "elite and cool" or for the packaging system. debian would be nothing without it. seeing an apt-get system replace other packaging systems within major linxu distributions would be a nice change. Also, may I point out that really, in the end, linux is linux, each distribution is just a different profile of packages wrapped around a kernel.
If everybody's switching to commercial, polished, ,uniformized versions of Linux, you can BET Debian's not going to thread that road.
Indeed, innovation has been going a bit slow over the last half of the decade, but I put that on the extreme need for Linux to prove itself in high-demand production environments.
Once we're all really accustomed to a really stable development model around Linux and the Debian community (esp. around "core" packages), I really expect someone to come up with some really funky idea, a new approach for Debian to progress beyond its boundaries.
Remember: if someone's going to come up with something really innovative, I'm betting he'll be in the largest group, and Debian's bigger (in many ways) than the largest of private corporations...
Lex
1)
Debian still makes a wonderful production server in some situations; something Gentoo really isn't up to doing.
I do think Debian is losing its edge in the developer community though. It used to be that most developers used Debian on their main workstation, but now you are seeing Gentoo mentioned a whole lot. I guess being that Gentoo is bleeding edge and source based, this does make sense.
Debian is also useful as a base for other distributions. Xandros, Lindows and Libranet are all Debian based. Having a nearly LSB compliant and completely Free Software Linux distribution is a good thing. It keeps the other players honest, and forces them to provide real value.
Apt-get continues to be the best solution for package management in Linux. It is being used by some on RPM systems such as Red Hat and SuSe. The only distribution that I believe would not be helped by apt-get is Mandrake, since their own tool urpmi is also very nice. In fact, if Mandrake were ever to go under (which looks very unlikely now), I think you'd see the distribution take on a similar role to Debian in the free software world.
In interest of disclosure: I use RedHat at work and Gentoo at home.
I personally don't have Debian on any computer I am responsible for. That said, I want Debian to exist. I don't want it to "lead"; I want it to be a sort of reference distro for the rest of us. If I see a package in Debian's stable branch I'm pretty confident that it's a reliable version of that application. No other distro, not even RH Enterprise, gets that much trust from me (though RHE comes close).
Debian's slow package release cycle is a feature, not a bug.
All's true that is mistrusted
I do think Debian is losing its edge in the developer community though. It used to be that most developers used Debian on their main workstation, but now you are seeing Gentoo mentioned a whole lot. I guess being that Gentoo is bleeding edge and source based, this does make sense.
Yes, it does make sense and it just seemed plain weird that many of the maintainer's of the flagship OS of the Free Software movement were surprised that there was a substantial group of users who actually wanted to compile Open Source rather than just install binaries.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Every time Debian or apt gets mentioned, Person A complains about the whole "RPM hell" thing and how nice apt-get in Debian is. And every time that happens, Person B comes along and berates Person A for not knowing that apt (and other things that serve similar purposes) can be used with rpms as well as debs.
/etc/apt/sources.list) before they have free access to thousands of apt-gettable packages.
In all those cases, Person B is quite correct, of course, but perhaps we should be pondering this question: "Why exactly do people persist in associating dependency problems with RedHat and nice easy apt-assisted package installations with Debian?"
I suspect that Person A's misunderstanding is usually quite justified. Apt-get (or at least _some_ dependency-handling front-end for dpkg) is an immediate reality for all Debian users, which they encounter quite soon after Debian is initially installed. They don't have to look deep into documentation, or see it discussed on-line, in order to discover apt-get. After installation they have nothing more to do (aside from perhaps trivial tweaks to
Now, I'll admit I haven't used RedHat in a while, so maybe things have changed (though that seems doubtful if people still have the rpm hell complaints), but I remember the default way of doing things was using rpm directly. I did play with Mandrake 9 a bit, and though I thought it was a pretty decent user-friendly distribution with a great installation, how to make use of urpmi wasn't nearly as immediately obvious to me as how to make use of apt-get was back when I first tried Debian. (Or portage when I first tried Gentoo, for that matter.)
So, I am imagining that the typical RedHat user (newbie RedHat users, especially) start out with the rpm command and dependency difficulties, and only later (if at all) learn about things like up2date, apt for rpm, etc. And then there are hoops to jump through to make use of them, since they aren't the default/typical way of doing things. And does RedHat provide thousands of rpms, always up to date (er, "up2date"), for free? If it's something users have to pay for, well, that's another hoop to jump through.
Taking that into account, I think the Person A we see in every remotely Debian (or Gentoo) related thread is quite justified in his misunderstanding. He's not talking about what can theoretically be done, or what he can configure his system to do--he's speaking from the immediate, practical reality that he faces after installing the different distributions.
But debian is the only distribution that has been able to iron out the depency problems by many years of large-scale upgrading (and downgrading) between exotic combitatons of versions of packages.
/me puts fingers in ears
:) I'll install RedHat. Why not Gentoo? The arguments for FreeBSD and Gentoo are pretty much identical. The arguments they give are almost always just biased towards RedHat because so-and-so that works here or someone's boss said that RedHat IS Linux and everything else is poop. It makes my life easier to drop into manager speak mode and talk about things like support and licensing and whatnot associated with RedHat. They see that they'll have to spend some money, and it makes sense to them.
elgaard> Gentoo? Gentoo?
elgaard>
elgaard> LA! LA! LA! LA! LA!
elgaard> Don't even SAY FreeBSD!
elgaard> I've I've NEVER HEARD OF THEM!
> --User Disconnected--
I have FreeBSD on an ancient 486 monocolor laptop. I think I was 2.1.7? when I installed. I can't rightly remember anymore. It's 4.8 now. No need to reinstall. I put Gentoo on my main workstation when I had issues with some hardware not liking FreeBSD. That was version 1.2 I think. Now I have 1.4 release. Didn't have to reinstall. I have emerge sync in cron. Updating my system goes something like this:
emerge -uD world
That's about it. Occasionally I'll have to update config files with etc-update, but not very often. I have nothing against Debian. It's a really decent distribution. The versions of things just aren't new enough. I upgrade a lot and use a lot of bleeding edge hardware on my main workstation though. In the past if I couldn't get FreeBSD to like something, I'd use RedHat just because it's practically the business standard GNU/Linux. This happens a lot with laptops. Now I have this mentality:
If I can get FreeBSD to work, I'll use it. The benefits so far outweigh the downside that it's not worth wasting the time to elaborate.
If it's a personal machine and I can't get FreeBSD to work, I'll use Gentoo now. The reasons I can't get FreeBSD to work are almost always going to be very easy to fix with Gentoo because of the source derived nature, and use of nearly bleeding edge code. There is a better chance I'll have support. Plus the source derived nature is a given and not an afterthought.
If it's a customers machine and I can't talk them into FreeBSD
The last thing I'm trying to do is piss on Debian. It's really great. I just have no need for it. If I want seemless bleeding edge stability, I have Gentoo when I can't get FreeBSD to play ball. I'm used to, and more comfortable doing things from source. I've been using source since Slackware. So in my case I'm going from one extreme to another. I don't really need something in the middle.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
half of debian seemed to depend on emacs.
Quite a bit of Debian depends upon a text editor. Emacs was probably just what you chose to install. If you were to put even nvi on there, you could remove everything else.
" Another Debain zealot who just doesn't get it. When, oh when will they quite trying to compete with the binary distro's and get back to their Open Source roots?"
/etc/apt/sources.list.
Sure, by Slashdot standards, I can accept the label, "Debian zealot". That's fine.
But no, really, I do not understand your criticism.
The point is, the source is available and usable in a relatively straightforward and managed manner if you wish to use it.
You can pull the source packages from the same mirrors housing Debian binary repositories. Just add a deb-src repository to your
Compiling from source in cases where performance increases will be negligable or non-existant, or in cases where the compile-time options of the binary build are acceptable, does nothing for you.
Typing "make install", "emerge", "apt-get source", "apt-build", or what have you, does not in and of itself increase your freedoms; it does not make you a hacker or a freedom fighter; it does not stick it to the man.
In most cases, all that doing so does is use more CPU cycles, and make you wait that much longer to have the package up and running.
Don't get me wrong; I believe that it is very important to have access to the source of every package. However, given the present state of average personal computing power, nothing is lost in binary distribution, so long as the source is available in an (ideally) equally usable form.
You seem to be emphasizing "Source", as if to say that Debian (or even Redhat) go against these "roots" by not providing source; they do provide the source, and in the case of Debian, what I am saying is that I have found this source to be sufficiently accessible in those cases in which I need it.
And further, I am conceding that there is room for improvement in streamlining this process and making compile-time configuration more accessible for those relatively few cases in which it is needed; these improvements are already under way.
What particularly of what I have written are you objecting to? Are you saying that there is some sort of significant appreciation shown, or important insights gained just by the very act of building and installing from source? Unless you are suggesting that every user read the source, or be forced to go through every compile-time option whether or not he or she wishes to or needs to, I fail to see how this appreciation or insight is significant.
Please explain.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in