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Happy 17th Birthday, Debian!
An anonymous reader writes "Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is now based."
Thanks Murdock! This distro is still one of the easiest to maintain over a long period of time.
I was coming from Slackware and apt-get seemed magical. Never left the boat since.
Long life to Debian!
It's actually kind of sad that most people identify Debian solely as being "that one that Ubuntu's based on".
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
To the distro I keep crawling back to. I always go off searching for the next great thing, and realise debian was the great thing all along.
And ubuntu is second rate (at best) compared to debian. Ubuntu's got severe stability problems. debian almost never fails me.
Maybe because the article has useful info and is interesting to read, while the 'official page' you linked feels like it belongs on geocities in the age of the blink tag?
Depends on what you mean by "last."
Debian will probably be kicking around on someone's toy web server or overly complex but overly awesome home file server for as long as there is someone either willing to get the kernel working on whatever hardware is available or rig up a network protocol to talk to our future brain/computer overlords.
IE will probably remain commercially relevant longer, sadly, for as long as there are corporations, there will be that one piece of mission critical software written X years ago that runs only on IE 6.0.
You seriously think Microsoft will embrace an LGPL browser engine? Originally from the KDE project?
Anyone who was actually using Linux in 1993 knows the manifesto came a couple of years before anything else.
I really, really wish people would stop comparing Apt and RPM, the actual comparison would be dpkg vs RPM. And just as pretty much nobody uses dpkg directly, the same applies to RPM. People use one of the various frontends (yum, urpmi, what have you). While at one time automatically resolving dependencies was godsend, it's nothing special now.
(I'm quite impartial to the debate, pacman is where it's at. It would be nice to see an actual apples to apples comparison for a change though)
'course, I just realized my post makes it seem like I think Debian sucks.
Frankly, Debian kicks ass. For a server, I'd consider nothing else. I've long believed that apt is, hands down, the best package management system ever invented. And Debian has done a truly marvelous job of ensuring that upgrades Just Work... unlike Ubuntu or Redhat, I have never feared doing a full distro update on Debian. Their package quality is simply through the roof (well, minus that pesky sshd bug they introduced ;).
Heck, I should given Debian a try again. It's been a couple years since I made the leap to Ubuntu, and it may be that Debian unstable could now fill the roll that Ubuntu fills for me today (as a modern desktop distro)... particularly given how incredibly painful Ubuntu in-place upgrades can be. OTOH, I am spoiled by the fact that Ubuntu has the nVidia blob drivers incorporated into their software repo...
Simple: geeks like to justify their superiority complex.
No, really. I started off in the bad old Slackware days, and you couldn't help but feel hardcore when you got your damned printer to work after fiddling with lpd and magic filters. But guess what happens as you get a little older? You stop giving a shit about that stuff. You just want to get on with it, already. Suddenly tweaking and fiddling with config files in /etc doesn't feel hardcore, it feels really fucking boring.
So while the rest of us pick a distro that just works out of the box, and so is labeled "dumbed down" because we don't have to manually edit config files, the young geeks can go on showing off how awesome they are because they switched to Gentoo and get to fiddle with their compiler flags.
As an aside, I still think Debian kicks ass. But no one would ever claim its a polished desktop Linux distribution (it can certainly become one with a bit of effort, but I've gotten past enjoying that kind of effort)... for a server, though, it's peerless, IMHO.
This.
I just giggled at these comments, where everyone's saying "Ubuntu just works" ... except in upgrades. It's like a fancy haircut from a stylist that just works, except you can't duplicate it the following evening for your date.
Just updating things like Open Office and Firefox caused dependency clashes - sorry, that's totally unacceptable. I met my share of the version upgrade bugs too.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
But guess what happens as you get a little older? You stop giving a shit about that stuff. You just want to get on with it, already. Suddenly tweaking and fiddling with config files in /etc doesn't feel hardcore, it feels really fucking boring.
You fix that problem at the start by by purchasing the correct hardware, not installing the correct distribution. I've been doing that since '93, its really quite easy.
Also in the past two decades or so I've noticed that the "stuff that only runs under windows" like winmodems, winprinters, winscanners, is generally, garbage and a complete waste of time under any OS, when compared to "standardized real stuff".
I was never able to buy and use a winmodem in the 90s, but I don't feel it was much of a loss.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You fix that problem at the start by by purchasing the correct hardware, not installing the correct distribution. I've been doing that since '93, its really quite easy.
Yeah, I've been attempting it since 94', and people like you have been claiming it's "really quite easy" for the last 16 years.
Obviously step 1 is "buy supported hardware". But for years, basic wifi didn't work out of the box in most Linux distros. That had absolutely nothing to do with driver support, and everything to do with the application stack either being insufficient to the task, and the distros doing a crappy job of integrating it properly (wifi before NetworkManager == hell on earth). Similarly, printer support used to be a sore spot, not because the drivers weren't available, but because the software made it an enormous pain in the ass to install them.
Distros like Ubuntu, focused on the user experience, finally polished this crap up (largely thanks to work by others, like RedHat (NetworkManager) and Apple (cups)), so now I don't have to manually fuck around with iwconfig or lpd in order to get a fully-functioning Linux desktop. And thank god for that, because, like I said, I'm *way* over finding that kind of thing fun/cool.
But, of course, the uber-geeks around here would have me believe that the distro I've chosen is "dumbed down" because, god forbid, I don't *have* to mess around with the bowels of my distro in order to get basic functionality to work. Which is weird, because it strikes me that it's far more dumb to waste time fiddling around with config files, when I could be getting real work done, instead...
How could one forget the Hurd? Debian is the best Hurd distribution there is.
Or did you think Debian was a Linux distro?
Watch this Heartland Institute video