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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."
So, when do we throw a Debian party, have cake and ice cream, and play pin the tail on Bill Gates?
My hat is off to you, Ian Murdock.
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
Pretty soon, Debian is going to want to drive, and of course, it'll want it's own car. Curfew? Good luck with that. And then, just when things seem to calm down, bam, you have to pay for college, or it knocks some girl up. It never ends.
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.
Getting through the installer, I realized that Emacs was taking up too much of my diskspace. So hey, Debian has a great package manager right? So I try to remove the emacs package and see that half of debian seemed to depend on emacs. It wasn't long after that I switched to Red Hat.
You know: "Emacs? It's a nice OS, but i lacks a good text-editor!"? Anyway, Debian is just great. But I guess I don't have to tell you that - You hate it our you love it.
It's kind of surprising to me. About four years ago, I would have said that for the non-commercial distributions, Slackware reigned easily at the top. They had decent integration, fairly acceptable release timing, and their installer was beautifully easy to use. At that time, Debian still had dselect as the primary tool, which was just painful, a problem with reliably functional ISO images for download, but they had a decent package system in the works.
Today, I'm having a hard time justifying keeping my Slackware install in place on my workstation. It's running 8.0, and I've manually updated enough stuff because of the lag in Slackware's development that I doubt an upgrade of sorts would work properly, yet I want the goodies that gnome2 provides, which looks too daunting to build by hand, with all of its assorted libraries and tools. So, at this point, switching to Debian, which I know is going to see active development for quite some time, is a very attractive option.
Debian's usefulness in the last few years gained so much that the aforementioned workstation is only Slackware, or even non-Debian Linux Box in my control.
The end of dselect being a requirement is probably what prompted that, though I still haven't ever had a successful i386 ISO-based install with it, it's been the two-floppies method.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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."
Today I wrote a comment on Slashdot about the retrospective on Debian on LinuxPlanet.There's also a very nice comment, based in part on my early ideasfrom another slashdot story, it is, as well, retrospective.
All your base are belong to us!
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.
Which of the above packages would have any meaningful use outside of Emacs? What functionality would you lose by not having any of the above? Given that it's an optional package with almost no reverse dependencies, I call your bluff.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
... is that they still do not manage to make installation take less than 5 hours.
If you know tomsrtbt, a rescue disk made (largely) by one person, one wonders why he alone can make PCMCIA support work out of the box while the 1000s of Debian developers are busy discussing if RFCs belong in main or non-free.
Not that there would be a better distribution than Debian, but tat does not mean there's no room for improvement.
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.
There a number of reasons why Debian still *is* the superior linux distribution. religion flame war? nope. Just facts.
Asid from Red Hat which is in the business of big honking big Iron servers,
1. Debian is the only other real distrubution that has real server admins relying on it.
2. Developers favor Debian. At first I just found it neat that so many develoers of my favorite apps tended to package for debian, but now it seems that debian is the defactor developer distro. It is stable for developers who want little change or very Unstable ") for those that want the most. I dont think anyother distro seems to based, except again for Red HAt(ie, apps developed only for redhat) Of course, if something is developed for debian only, dont think it can be the case that is is Debian only, I could be wrong but I would liekt o know
3. Community: It is the largest. Bar None. On IRC there might be anywheres of 500 prople logged in. You can count on at least 1-2 people there that will know what you are tallking about. This is a key feature for why I use debian
Sigs are dangerous coy things
2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
My how things have changed.
6) Debian will make Linux easier for users who don't have access to the
Internet.
Debian's main strongpoint is apt-get, which would not be so useful for users with no internet access. The beauty of Debian is that you can install it once and update it forever. Seems Debian's original goals and their current strongpoints are quite different.