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Debian Is the Most Important Linux
inkscapee writes "Without Debian we are nothing. Debian is the most influential and important Linux, and is unique for being the largest, oldest, 100% non-commercial community-driven distro. '...just under 63% of all distributions now being developed come ultimately from Debian. By comparison, 50 (15%) are based on Fedora or Red Hat, 28 (9%) on Slackware, and 12 (4%) on Gentoo.'"
Yes.
These numbers mean one of two things. Either devs should:
1) Allocate more resources into developing Debian because it's the most important distro, or
2) Allocate more resources into the rest because Linux may be losing its diversity.
It helps to know where you're going...
Isn't 'Number of descendent distributions' a crappy metric for 'Importance'? Wouldn't something like 'Installed base' be humongously better?
No, the reason Linux does not have a large desktop market share is because it matured 10 years too late, after Microsoft had already established a stranglehold on the desktop market. The barrier to entry is massive. Fragmentation is a minor issue in comparison to the difficulty of challenging an established monopoly.
The only way Linux will ever succeed on the consumer desktop is if it (a) runs all Windows applications and games perfectly, and (b) never presents users with any uncertainty or minor difficulties. Because the truth is this: when a user has have a problem with Linux, they blame Linux. When they have the same problem with Windows, they blame themselves or their computer. That is the real reason why Linux has only made major inroads in markets such as smartphones, where there was no existing monopoly.
I suspect that debian is going to make FreeBSD a lot better for FreeBSD users.
Debian does a lot of work making sure that all of software works on all the architectures that it supports
Mozilla claims that Firefox runs on Linux, but debian had to jump through hoops to get Firefox to compile, much less run on the MIPS platform.
By making Kfreebsd a first class platform, a lot of fixes for FreeBSD should make it upstream, which should improve the quality of the software in the ports tree.
The big contribution debian makes is debian policy and the QA on all the architectures that it supports.
Some of the billion respins are probably interesting, but the copyright fights, and the code improvements to support cross compiling are things that leak into other distributions. Debian was one of the reasons that AMD64 support is as good as it is under Linux. The Redhat, gentoo, and slackware users that use the 64bit versions are benefiting from Debian getting their distribution to run on 64 bit platforms for years.
Personally, I think the title of the article is true, but that the article provided no evidence about all the contributions that Debian brings to Linux users and just argued "it's the parent" Which if that is the case, BSD386 is the most important OS, as it is in many ways the ancestor of Solaris, OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, The GNU project and all the GNU systems. In other words, everything other than Windows. And Windows has some FTP and telnet code from BSD386 in it, and at one time the windows TCP/IP stack was based on the BSD386 network stack.
Gentoo, Redhat, SuSE, Slackware, Canonical and others contribute in ways that help build the Linux ecosystem, but it is hard to overstate Debian's importance to the ecosystem by being an large, neutral, cross platform distribution, that is very transparent. Unfortunately it is possible to completely miss this and ramble on and on about the number of respins that exist.
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