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Debian Fastest-Growing Distro, Says Netcraft
Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.
adamy writes "For people like me that use both Free/Open Source software and Java, the two have come together with two major exception: The Java Virtual Machine and the Base Libraries. Seems the folks trying to get Java packages ready for Sarge could have listed the issues. This is an interesting example of dependency tree pruning: Several packages are orphaned because they depend on Ant, which depends on Swing. Swing has been lower priority for the Classpath because most of the java pacakages are server side or lack a UI componenet."
That's a good point, but Debian's release policy has X on x86 practically a full year behind the current release because it's not stable on all the other platforms yet. I know I can get the experimental packages, but a current unstable install will give me nothing better than 8-bit color for 1024x768 on my laptop. Apparently releasing packages for each platform independently will cause too much confusion in the bug tracking system (which I think is bullocks, you have to track the bugs on each platform separately anyways).
The result is that the Debian installer sux on 11 architectures.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Why? Feel ashamed to have muddied yourself with lesser distros because you fell victum to the temptation of automagic tools?
Come back to the light man. It's better over here.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?