I don't think most of the Debian derived distros are forks. Just look at Ubuntu, they take Debian as their new base every few years and incorporate most of the 'community supported' packages directly from Debian.
Simple example clamav or something on Ubuntu 10.10 and look at the changelog.Debian.gz file which tells you who did what changes in Ubuntu or Debian:
Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:46:37 +0100 -> change by Debian maintainer Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:04:10 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu maintainer: merge from Debian Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:49:56 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu maintainer: Cherry pick [git-id] from Debian Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:27:51 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu mainter: an Ubuntu change Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:27:51 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu mainter: security fix
That is pretty clear. But you say that is not very desktop orientated ?
Let's take the xserver-xorg-core-package:
Ubuntu took the package from Debian experimental on 17 July 2010 and did their changes on it.
And they will take the original Debian package again every few years, mostly 'just' after the LTS release.
That depends on where you look. Many, many places run Debian servers.
And if it wasn't for CentOS I don't think people would be using as many RPM-based distributions on servers. I don't think many people run Fedora or OpenSUSE on production servers. Because all the other big RPM-based distros are for-pay. And with for-pay distros you don't get such as much community support.
“I’ve always had a few problems [with Ubuntu.] It’s not very friendly to kernel developers, and I just end up giving up. That’s kind of okay, because clearly I am not the target audience.”
I guess the same goes for Debian. For example Debian does really well on servers.
But Linus obviously is not a 'user' anyway, as he had no clue which distros are the first ones that popularised live-cd usage.
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).
It is not so much dpkg that is important, it is the quality of well it is packaged. This is partly because of the long release cycle, all possible conflicts and problems will be found because many people use testing and update frequently. Even though Debian has (I think ?) the largest number of packages (maybe I should source packages).
Actually, HTML5 is kind of a revolt against the ideas of XHTML.
XHTML specifies if their is a single mistake on the XML you should stop rendering and only display a warning, this is not acceptable for (read: useful to) the user.
So maybe XML is technically better, but HTML is more useable in practise.
The reason we are now getting all these new specs the W3C is because W3C wanted XML-syntax for HTML and all these 'innovations' got delayed.
Web site designers usually are users too and fully agree with you. But marketing seems to keep asking for it and I guess some people comply because they want to keep their job.
I think it is the job of browser vendors to make it easier for the user to remove/disable certain style types/elements so all that is left is the real content.
WebGL is probably the hardest part to get right of all the specifications, because it so depends very much on other parts of the system.
The page was mostly for developers and knowledgable users I would guess.
But luckily WebGL is only a very small part of all the new stuff. IE9 will not support it, so that might be a reason people won't be using it much.
The specification has been made and people are doing testing because if you don't do that, the problems will not be found and fixed and it will never advance.
That doesn't mean that in a few years all platforms, systems, drivers you 'buy' in the shop can not support it and we can all start using it and maybe even Microsoft will release IE10 with support for it.
Then disable the damn PDF-plugin, problem solved (if you ask me).
It is safer too, because it won't automatically load the PDF in Acrobat/whatever.
Acrobat has many, many issues and will never be fixed. Even Adobe does not know how to even make a specification which is not ambiguous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY
Hey, do you know you can just leave out all the fancy stuff and only view the real content ? It is all interpreted you know and you can make the browser interpreted it as you like. You can make a lot of stuff just disappear.
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I don't think most of the Debian derived distros are forks. Just look at Ubuntu, they take Debian as their new base every few years and incorporate most of the 'community supported' packages directly from Debian.
Simple example clamav or something on Ubuntu 10.10 and look at the changelog.Debian.gz file which tells you who did what changes in Ubuntu or Debian:
Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:46:37 +0100 -> change by Debian maintainer
Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:04:10 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu maintainer: merge from Debian
Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:49:56 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu maintainer: Cherry pick [git-id] from Debian
Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:27:51 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu mainter: an Ubuntu change
Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:27:51 -0500 -> change by Ubuntu mainter: security fix
That is pretty clear. But you say that is not very desktop orientated ?
Let's take the xserver-xorg-core-package:
Ubuntu took the package from Debian experimental on 17 July 2010 and did their changes on it.
And they will take the original Debian package again every few years, mostly 'just' after the LTS release.
Coincidentally many, many run Debian servers.
I personally think Debian is a server operating system first and a good base for desktop distros second.
That depends on where you look. Many, many places run Debian servers.
And if it wasn't for CentOS I don't think people would be using as many RPM-based distributions on servers. I don't think many people run Fedora or OpenSUSE on production servers. Because all the other big RPM-based distros are for-pay. And with for-pay distros you don't get such as much community support.
He also says:
“I’ve always had a few problems [with Ubuntu.] It’s not very friendly to kernel developers, and I just end up giving up. That’s kind of okay, because clearly I am not the target audience.”
I guess the same goes for Debian. For example Debian does really well on servers.
But Linus obviously is not a 'user' anyway, as he had no clue which distros are the first ones that popularised live-cd usage.
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).
It is not so much dpkg that is important, it is the quality of well it is packaged. This is partly because of the long release cycle, all possible conflicts and problems will be found because many people use testing and update frequently. Even though Debian has (I think ?) the largest number of packages (maybe I should source packages).
Based on the number of visitors to Wikipedia, over 50% of all Linux desktop users use Ubuntu:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-01/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
But more visitors use Android than Ubuntu.
And more people use Ubuntu than MacOS on PowerPC.
Many people run the Ubuntu LTS-version, but more run the latest stable.
I think officially you should call it: a Java-like language ?
Most of my disks are 3.5" :-)
Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/
Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/
Actually found out this was a better addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reader/
Actually, HTML5 is kind of a revolt against the ideas of XHTML.
XHTML specifies if their is a single mistake on the XML you should stop rendering and only display a warning, this is not acceptable for (read: useful to) the user.
So maybe XML is technically better, but HTML is more useable in practise.
The reason we are now getting all these new specs the W3C is because W3C wanted XML-syntax for HTML and all these 'innovations' got delayed.
Have a look at the longer story:
http://diveintohtml5.org/past.html#timeline
Web site designers usually are users too and fully agree with you. But marketing seems to keep asking for it and I guess some people comply because they want to keep their job.
I think it is the job of browser vendors to make it easier for the user to remove/disable certain style types/elements so all that is left is the real content.
Like so:
https://www.readability.com/
I think Safari implements something like that as well ?
WebGL is probably the hardest part to get right of all the specifications, because it so depends very much on other parts of the system.
The page was mostly for developers and knowledgable users I would guess.
But luckily WebGL is only a very small part of all the new stuff. IE9 will not support it, so that might be a reason people won't be using it much.
The specification has been made and people are doing testing because if you don't do that, the problems will not be found and fixed and it will never advance.
That doesn't mean that in a few years all platforms, systems, drivers you 'buy' in the shop can not support it and we can all start using it and maybe even Microsoft will release IE10 with support for it.
Then disable the damn PDF-plugin, problem solved (if you ask me).
It is safer too, because it won't automatically load the PDF in Acrobat/whatever.
Acrobat has many, many issues and will never be fixed. Even Adobe does not know how to even make a specification which is not ambiguous:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY
You can make Firefox 4 look like Firefox 3 if that is what you want.
Only difference is, the user can make the browser display the content in anyway they want it displayed.
For example, like this:
https://www.readability.com/
Do other software is:
Transparant caching proxies that do not properly implement HTTP.
Websites can silently inject fake data in the cache of such a proxy.
The reason for it being disabled is because Mozilla and atleast Opera wants to implement a version of the protocol which can not be abused this way.
Actually, HTML5 is trying to fix a lot of those problems.
For example, it has a complete specification how to parse valid and invalid HTML.
Hey, do you know you can just leave out all the fancy stuff and only view the real content ? It is all interpreted you know and you can make the browser interpreted it as you like. You can make a lot of stuff just disappear.
For example with this addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/readability/
You do know you can 'wipe' them ? don't you ? You just have to do it every few months, maybe even weeks.
And I also found flashcache which was developed by Facebook which does the same.
bcache or flashcache both are not in the mainline kernel (yet)
That is what ZFS with L2ARC ('level 2'-cache) does, it uses the SSD as a cache for the slower but bigger disks.
On Linux a fairly new development called bcache does something similair
"mostly a result of Intel's controllers"
Actually, the controller is just the hardware. It is the software running on it which makes it smart. Intel owns the software I would think.