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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."
Debian, making installing dependencies a reflex rather than a compulsory chore. That alone would have gotten my praise. Then they also bolted on an incredibly stable and useful kernel and software stack on top of that.
Good show! (I know I got the order wrong, but thats the order of importance to me)
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
In terms of name, my bet would be on IE. If the Debian leaders manage to act retarded enough the community might have to fork and pick a new name but the project would live on. While with IE I figure there's a good chance Microsoft will eventually figure out that developing their own browser engine is a waste of resources and create their own Webkit-based browser, but still under the IE name. So one could have the same content with a different name, the other different content with the same name.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually most base Ubuntu as "That one that's based on Debian". :)
I refer to it as Red Hat on training wheels
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I don't entirely get all of the Ubuntu complaints.
Over the years I tried maybe fifteen or twenty different Linux distros. (back to the days of buying boxed sets of Mandrake floppy disks!) Each time I went back to Windows because I invariably ran into some problem that I just didn't have the time to figure out and fix. You know, little things like printers, modems, and video.
It's not that I don't like fixing things, or even learning new stuff, just that with Linux it was always so damned painful.
Two months ago I installed Ubuntu using their little Windows installer app, and I haven't looked back. Aside from one occasion when a specific Windows program wouldn't run under WINE, I have had no reason to fire up Windows. And when I did.. well, yuck.
You may call Ubuntu "dumbed down", but it's honestly the first distro I've seen that worked flawlessly out of the box with virtually no fiddling.
And of course you can still fire up a terminal window and enjoy the command line.
Three Squirrels
I think you summed it up fairly well.
As a project, Debian is most interested in Freedom and stability. Although someone coming from a *nix back ground shouldn't have much trouble, someone new to computers or coming over from one of the dark sides is likely to.
Enter Ubuntu. Their primary interest is getting Linux on the desktop. Debian is an ideal base because it has everything, so you just need to keep current on the unstable version and put some chrome on it.
Grey beards keep their Debian and the whipper snappers stay off the lawn.