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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
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.
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.
There are a fair number of assholes and jerks in #debian@freenode, it's true. But that sort of thing happens in any community. No matter what the subject, there will be people who get their entire sense of self-worth from treating those less-far-along like crap.
The key is to realize that there are other avenues for help. The debian-user mailing list, in contrast to #debian, is almost always friendly (even when someone does something stupid, the response may be stern, but almost never *mean*); and it's tremendously more informative/educational/useful. I highly recommend it.
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.
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