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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?
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.
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
Android 2.2 for i386
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
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