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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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, be careful. I have seen newbies with legitimate questions get RTFMs there; just not in that form. Rather, they're typically delivered in a less mean-spirited way. For example, someone posting "I got this error message: _______. What does it mean? What do I do?" might get a response of "Google is your friend for this sort of thing. I googled on that error message and got this webpage (________), which has an explanation and a solution." Sometimes a link to Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" will be provided, as well. Much kinder than an RTFM, but in the same vein.
Not that I think that's a bad thing. To me, part of being helpful is to help people learn how to help themselves in the future . . .so long as one does so kindly (which, for the most part, debian-user does, and #debian@freenode doesn't).
But at the same time, I didn't want what you wrote above to give the impression that no one is ever encouraged to do some work themselves.
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
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.