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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.'"
Yet another dick measuring contest? Seriously?
...is the natural "next step" from ubuntu for those looking for something less experimental.
But one distro being more important than another? Ludicrous. All distros are essentially the same, except for minor variations in desktop environment, package installer, and selection of usermode programs loaded onto the install CD. If one distro were chosen at random and all others ceased to exist, the linux world would continue as usual.
This smells suspiciously like flame-bait. And if you look carefully, you'll see an army of trolls off in the horizon.
Isn't 'Number of descendent distributions' a crappy metric for 'Importance'? Wouldn't something like 'Installed base' be humongously better?
I think Slackware is just slightly older than Debian and this graph seems to indicate that as well.
Red Hat, Debian, and pretty much everyone except Linus Torvalds himself use a modified version of the Linux kernel.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If you go by the importance of infrastructure run, I would guess that CentOS (binary compatible with Red Hat, without Red Hat fees) is is the most important Linux distro out there. The last three companies I worked at that use Linux in the data center used CentOS.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
See, with
1. RedHat doing their weird patches thing, and their restrictions when you use RedHat Network (Red Hat Stops Shipping Kernel Changes as Patches), and the huge lag times between RHEL updates
plus
2. Ubuntu doing stuff that some people don't like, plus the whole Unity/Wayland thing,
the importance of a good, free, working and fresh distro is highlighted.
OK, so you're going to say "Debian, fresh?" But I think this might be a good time for both Ubuntu users to test the Debian waters, and for Debian to get its act together.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
>Is Android considered linux?
In everyday usage the word Linux refers to the whole OS. And by that we mean the kernel, GNU stuff, (sometimes also X11 and whatnot). In light of that, Android is not Linux, even if it technically is.
Kinda funny.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
When laying claim to a statment that "X is the most important of Y", one would expect that to be backed up my statisitics proving that point.
The only half-serious attempt that the author has made at this is in the 3rd paragraph. And even then, he is merely quoting select figures from distrowatch, without further derivation or detail, let alone an attempt to paint a balanced picture. The rest of the article is basically a listing of the various distros based off debian.
That is precisely what the title of this article should have been: "List of distros based on debian"
Instead, the author has chosen to go for the dramatic, attention grabbing headline - and has in some respects succeeded, in that as he has gotten his article slashdotted.
Nothing interesting here, don't waste your time RTFA, move on.
Linux is officially just a kernel, and a "Linux distro" is any suite of user-side, open source software that provides a complete operating system based on that Linux kernel.
That makes Android a totally kosher Linux distro, even if it is an unusual one with a special Java-based UI by default. It can't be suggested that lack of X11 means that it's not a Linux distro, since there are lots of other Linux distros without X11 too.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It didn't think it was that relevant either - but the distro on my phone, eeePC and even knoppix comes from Debian. That is what it is about and not distro install fests from a decade ago.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/01/our-exclusive-interview-with-linus-torvalds-lca2011/
“I’ve tried it a couple of times over the years, mainly because the thing Ubuntu did so well was make Debian usable. I always felt that Debian was a pointless exercise because to me, the point of a distribution is to make everything easy. Easy to install, to be pretty and to be friendly and Ubuntu did that to Debian.”
That must hurt.
Exactly what do you call "infrequent"? We release Debian 3 times a day (that's the number of Dak run per day in SID), and stable every 2 years (that is at least truth for both Lenny and Squeeze, and everyone is trying to keep the pace). More and more people that once moved to Ubuntu are returning to Debian. Exactly WHAT is making you say that "development seems halted"? Is that the 10 000 new packages that came with the new release (Squeeze), which brings the number of packages to nearly 30 000? Stay in the past if you want, don't read the information, but please, we don't need such a silly comment.
You didn't RTFA did you? Debian came in first. Not you.
Android 2.2 for i386
Yes, it is Linux. Just because you say it's not doesn't make it so. Just because it's become a fork, for now at least, doesn't make anything you've said valid. It runs a Linux kernel, modified yes but still Linux.
I don't care what you say about Linux - just spell it correctly.
Apple's OS/X
Uh...
Circumcision is child abuse.
Does it matter ? Because Debian is now a BSD-distro now. ;-)
http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
Seriously.
I think OpenBSD might have the most influence, because they created/maintain OpenSSH.
Which is used in many, many if not all Linux, BSD and other Unix based systems, routers and managed switches.
I think FreeBSD is where a lot of drivers are being created for all the BSDs and I think for the Linux kernel as well.
FreeBSD is also used by Juniper as the basis for Junos for their routers, which runs a large percentage of the internet.
OpenSolaris is dead, but OpenIndiana/Illumos will keep it going for that community. Which means there is free code which can do ZFS and Dtrace (which itself is also incorporated in FreeBSD).
New things are always on the horizon
Comparing Debian to Android is actually very interesting. Debian has something like 32,000 packages that can be installed, but it's taken something like 15 years to get there. Android blasted to over 100,000 in something like 2 to 3 years. Debian is all about community contribution, while Android is all about selling closed-source apps, with no sharing of code between. In theory, it should be easier to publish an app in Debian than Android, but this is not the case at all. In Debian, you have to find a sponsor, do a complicated job of packaging, pray your package gets uploaded to Unstable, and then wait a few years while it migrates to Stable before other programmers will generally have access to your work. I call this the Debian Red Tape. It's suffocating innovation in the open-source community, and it's the reason Android is kicking Debian butt.
I believe there is a solution, but it requires a completely new packaging system. Let's compare Android and Debian packaging:
- Android ships every dependent binary in the .apk app file. This eliminates the nightmare of having your app crash because some library you use gets updated. .so files across applications. This made sense in the '90s when disk space was scarce, but now days, it's just dumb. The reason it takes years to get a packaged library into Debian Stable is that it takes years before we believe you library wont cause other apps to crash.
- Debian is all about resusing
A new packaging system could share identical binaries between apps to save both disk and memory space, but it should not ever change a binary used by an app. Also, publishing new packages should be as easy as creating a repo on github.net. You simply declare that it's available, and everyone can use it. Whether a developer decides to depend on your code should be a matter of trust, which could be scored based on developer reputation, code stability and what other packages use it.
Without a major upgrade to our packaging system, Debian will continue to fall further and further behind. Why do so many people feel they have to build a custom Debian based distro? Because Debian incapable of addressing the needs of modern users. Frankly, even with the total lack of libraries available for Android, and with Google having their heads up there arse with respect to accepting contributions from the community, I am able to contribute more to Android than I can to Debian. Check out my library that I've made available to both at dev.vinux-project.org/sonic. I'm basically done for Android, while I'm still waiting for a Debian sponsor over in Debian land.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
In everyday usage the word Linux refers to the whole OS. And by that we mean the kernel, GNU stuff, (sometimes also X11 and whatnot). In light of that, Android is not Linux, even if it technically is.
Which might even validate the point of the people who insist that Linux distributions similar to desktop Linux be called GNU/Linux. This would at least serve to distinguish "GNU/Linux" on N900 from "embedded Linux" on Android phones.
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.
Work bio at MMWD
You're forgetting that out of those thousands of Android apps, most of them are built for Dalvik, not "Linux." There is a project porting Dalvik to FreeBSD, will it still be Linux after that? There are far more Debian packages _for Linux_ than there are for Android, and there are no Debian packages for Dalvik that I know of.
The reason so many people are making custom Debian distros is because Debian is an extremely stable base with a pretty nice package manager, and they want to customize it. That's it. I would not say it is "falling behind" at all, the sheer number of distributions based on it seems to rule that out.
Android is primarily used in cell phones of which there are millions. That is the only reason for its market share. It's not kicking anything's butt on the PC.
Shared libraries still makes just as much sense. Packages that include their own copies of libraries (or for that matter are statically built) are a serious seurity issue. It's mostly fine for applications that can be sandboxed, but mostly it's a security nightmare. A library change that causes applications to crash either indicates incorrect assumptions made in the application (possibly due to a poorly documented library), or an ABI-break in the library -- the latter should always trigger a bumped SO-name.
Part of the reason that it takes a long time for Debian to release is the size of the archives, part of it is because in a lot of cases we do quality assurance on behalf of application writers who believe that embedded library copies is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Does Arch have secure package management yet?
I don't get it. RH is a very accepted standard, whether or not it is more or less "influential" than Debian. RH isn't fly by night, has been around as a commercial product for many, many years, has the backing of the parent corporation, which is actually profitable. The CentOS project was born from it, which makes the RH system completely free for use by people such as myself.
And being used by a number of other distros has nothing to do with market penetration or quality. RH (and CentOS) haven't been forked to death because they already do exactly what many businesses want: provide a steady and reliable server platform. This isn't nearly as sexy or cutting edge as desktops for a reason. I don't want my Linux web server to be "cutting edge", I want it up 99.99% of the time.
RH isn't the only choice, and isn't always the best choice, but it is certainly a viable choice for many applications.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Everyone knows deep down that "most important of" originates from the part of the brain responsible for mating behaviours and penis size comparisons. People are attracted to the dialog in the aspiration to become one of the lucky lekkers. And even if the lek has nubility factor zero, it's good practice just in case if your prospects are poor and you have nothing better to do.
At a certain age, you tire of the loud clatter of penis rulers and you just want to hand the participants a scalpel and a bassinet labelled "least important" to find out whether they really believe that every infinite series can be approximated (for the purpose of getting laid) by the first term alone.
I sometimes wonder if the donning the coat of arms of truncated approximation functions as a sexual status symbol. If the well runs deep, no need to bother with second order effects; leave those worries to the mincing greybeards whose primary term has shrivelled up.
For me the miracle of conception is how quickly the brain reprises all those forgotten terms, if there were any in there to begin with.
Congratulations to the person posting this story for telling the world that your swimmers have yet to enter the pool.
And being used by a number of other distros has nothing to do with market penetration or quality
Exactly. No real innovation has come out of Debian. In fact, their situation was so messed up, they needed a millionaire do-gooder to sort their mess up.
From the technical standpoint, Red Hat is the distro that advanced Linux the most. That's a fact.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts