Branden Robinson Lays Down the Law at Debian 386
darthcamaro writes "Newly elected Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson posted his first report as DPL. From the looks of it, Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand. In an interview on internetnews.com, though, Robinson talks about whether Debian should even hold onto any money at all. Holding onto cash is also likely not what those who donate to the Debian Project expect either, according to Robinson. "People who donate us money ... seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near-term, not towards establishing an endowment,' he said."
Holding Out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I would like to donate to Debian knowing that my money would be used on improving the server aspects of Debian and not be spent on making GNOME or KDE look pretty. They should adopt something similar to Crossover Office where you can choose what your money should be spent on.
Well bitching aside I love Debian, I am just Joe Sixpack and I haven't had to so much as touch my mailserver or audio server (Ampache) in a LONG ass time, my uptime is pressing on over a year.
Re:Holding Out? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't they make a form for you to fill out along with your donation. This goes into a poll, with 1 vote for every dollar or something spent.
That way, they can prioritize what the people who fund them want. Everyones happy!
Re:Holding Out? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Except we never really get to vote on spending. We vote representatives into office who immediately start ignoring us in favor of special interests (pick one - environmental lobby, business lobby, pro-welfare, anti-welfare, pro-military, pro-peace, interventionalists (both liberal and conservative), isolationists, etc.
Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willi
Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since what you pay in tax isn't voluntary, you don't get a vote.
Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno about that. Our biggest expense is social security, medicare, and medicaid, and they're so popular that changing them is almost impossible.
Then there's military. I seem to recall Zell Miller getting quite a bit of applause in the Republican primary by accusing Kerry of trying to cut funding for the B1 and B2 bombers, leaving
Endowment? (Score:5, Interesting)
10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.
Speaking of which, does anyone have a donation link?
Re:Endowment? -- donation link info (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.debian.org/donations
This tells us basically to go to:
http://www.spi-inc.org/donations
Here you find link to donate money. Please note you should designate your money to "Debian" to ensure it is used only for Debian. Otherwise, money will be spread over all the projects supported by SPI, I think.
Osamu
Re:Endowment? -- donation link info (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hardly good for impulsive donations, and certainly a long way away from 1-click-ordering.
I did suggest they take pay-pal to make it easy for people to donate quickly and simply. I was told they had talked about it before and would bring it up again later.
In normal debian timescales they could be getting on quite quickly with making debian donations easy.
I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.
Sam
I tried - they didn't cash my check (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried donating once about 2 years ago. Unfortunately (for Debian and the SPI), I raised a big stink about them not accepting Paypal, credit cards, or anything electronic. This wasn't received very well. I finally just sent them a check for $50 but it was never cashed. I don't know whether it was lost or if the treasurer just decided he didn't want my money.
Re:Endowment? (Score:2, Informative)
Only if you know where you can earn a steady 20% interest (let alone after taxes and adjusting for inflation.)
Re:Endowment? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Endowment? (Score:2)
Investment in the short term would result in both preservation and extension of its base, which is likely to bring more funds (assuming 10 developers would improve the release date for Sarge, over 2 developers).
At the rate we're going, Sarge will take forever and people will start to abandon the project and new developers will go to Centos and Ubuntu. But, IMHO, we need a project/organization like Debian and we really nee
Re:Endowment? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Holding Out? (Score:4, Funny)
If they wanted to donate money to X, maybe they ought to have sent it to, say, Debian...
But, in general, organizations hate it when you donate money for a specific purpose, because that purpose invariably goes out of date before the money is entirely spent. For example, the server aspects of Debian are already so good that you don't bother to change them; what good does throwing more money at that do?
Re:Holding Out? (Score:2)
Me's gonna pop my 5$ in the pot for Debian, and you?
Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Holding Out? (Score:2)
Re:Holding Out? (Score:2)
Although it's a commercial entity, they should have something like CodeWeaver's Compatibility database. This is the entry for MS Project 2002 [codeweavers.com] and it has two pledges at $119 or so.
What do they need the money for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What do they need the money for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe on travel to conferences and new hardware for compatability? I'm sure it's documented somewhere.
Re:What do they need the money for? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What do they need the money for? (Score:2)
Re:What do they need the money for? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly where ftp mirroring came from... instead of 100 downloads of the same thing, host a local mirror for those 100 that doesn't consume any external bandwidth (beyond the mirror process itself) -- and in most cases, it's faster, too. This has lead to the current world of web proxies (aka "web acceler
There's only one thing to do. (Score:3, Funny)
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Million Bucks? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Million Bucks? (Score:3, Funny)
Fuckin A
Re:Million Bucks? (Score:4, Funny)
Broke? (Score:5, Funny)
I can only wish I was broke like that. Usually, I wind up eating canned chili for a week, not with 40 grand in my pocket.
(yes, I realize that's broke for a major project, but seeing broke and 40 thou in the same sentence still messes with my head).
Re:Broke? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not. Debian has very little need for money. Hardware? Donated. Bandwidth? Donated. Staff? Volunteer, or in a few cases salaried by companies with an interest in Debian. Conferences? Sponsored by those same companies. I'm sure there are things the Project could do with a huge budget, but all in all there are a lot more needy nonprofits out there.
Re:Broke? (Score:2)
Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article. (Score:5, Insightful)
He said, matter of factly, that he is trying to figure out Debian's assest held for it by different originizations. "Software in the Public Interest" (SPI) has 40,000 dollars, and that's a Debian offshoot. Debian originazation in Britian has another 4 thousand and various other moneys are spread around in places like Brazil.
He didn't say that it was enough, or more then enough, or less then enough, or that Debian is broke or Debian is rich or anything like that.
The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.
Re:Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article. (Score:2, Funny)
than
than
THAN
Re:Broke? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Broke? (Score:3, Funny)
Rice? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Broke? (Score:2)
Re:Broke? (Score:2)
Re:Broke? (Score:2)
Please!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Please!! (Score:2)
Re:Please!! (Score:2)
how bout Oh Please!! (Score:3, Informative)
There you go, your done, the waitings over..
Don't you fell better now ? .. Seriously, what's the deal with this Sarge release hysteria ? It's out there, I use it, it works, it seems pretty stable to me (in my case more than Ubuntu warty was)
Re:how bout Oh Please!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Unles you are the one providing the support, perhaps you would be better off looking at something like Xandros for your commercial environment. That way you get your Debian, and someone to phone.
Even after Sarge is officialy declared "released" there are sure to be updates and bug fixes, just as there are today with woody. The fact that they call it "testing"
Re:how bout Oh Please!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I get scared when people 'acronymize' their title (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know this guy, and I don't know much about what he is doing, but the tone and inflection of his statement seems to be self-aggrandizing...to me at least. I'm not flaming him, I'm just stating an opinion of how I read the text. Honestly, I don't really give a rat's ass about this Debian debate...but I do see why someone could use this particular article as ammunition to attack his credibility.
Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit (Score:2, Informative)
What? You're referring to "DPL" for Debian Project Leader? Dude, we've all called the DPL the DPL as long as there has been one.
Re:I get scared when people 'acronymize' their tit (Score:2)
ALL of us?
Damn...I must have been high that week that every Debian geek was in agreement about something.
Branden Robinson (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness. I don't know him personally, so I'm not the most qualified judge, but I do not consider his election a good thing for Debian. Leaders should ideally be good at communicating, and less good at ignoring and insulting people, and what I've seen of him reflects those negative traits more than the positive one.
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Jerk, plain and simple (Score:3, Funny)
Where I come from we have a saying. Shut the @$@@ up is a dish best served cold.
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:2)
Its still there I think. I use it as my desktop. Its funny dammit!
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:3, Interesting)
Branden has really mellowed out a lot over the years. He did a decent job communicating as treasurer of SPI[1], and I think he is ready for the role of DPL. Time will tell, of course, but I find his initial email encouraging.
[1] SPI has had several "accounting scandals", info is publically available [spi-inc.org] if you're interested. Some people want to lay the blame at Branden's feet, but IMHO
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:4, Informative)
That graphic went up during a time when X was in flux, there had been a major upstream release, and Branden was trying really, really hard to provide a consistent, stable set of packages for X across all the umpteen platforms that Debian officially supports. This is a very, very hard thing to do. And while Branden was trying to do all this, there were the legions of i386 n00bs jumping up and down, moaning complaining, and not contributing, asking "Hey, when are you going to give me my updated X packages??!?!!!one"
Branden at some point got sick of it, and simply told people what they deperately needed to hear: HAANCOSTFU.
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of obnoxious twits in the FOSS world, who are quick to flame for silly reasons -- but Branden is not one of them. He neither ignores people nor throws around gratuitous insults. If you compare him to a real flame-master (read a BSD development list sometime...) he seems almost boring.
He isn't afraid to call a spade a spade though, nor to use humor, and he apparently doesn't subscribe to white-bread corporate standards for discourse.
I personally find his honesty, straight-forwardness, and humor refreshing, and think his election is a very good thing for Debian.
Re:Sign of genius? (Score:2)
Re:Branden Robinson (Score:2)
Seems to me that this should have been the FIRST response. Its a good thing Debian is a volunteer project. Anywhere else, his ass would have been shit-canned with extreme prejudice. Hell, I think even most volunteer projects would can you for something like that.
Typo? (Score:2, Interesting)
A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard CPUs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C (Score:2)
Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C (Score:3)
Re:A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard C (Score:2)
Debian is the only maintained distro I'm aware of that still supports Alpha, let alone MIPS or other "non-standard" CPUs. I can appreciate the "let's light a fire under the developer's asses" rhetoric, but that doesn't solve pressing problems, like a lack of builds for "orphan" architectures. There are people out there that still want a Linux distro that works for their machine, and they don't always run x86;
Or perhaps find some competant people to fork Debian into a distro for bizarre, dead arches? Hel
Well ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I moved from Mandrake to Debian because I like estoeric math software. I ran into trouble with Mandrake where I could get some stuff from Mandrake's unstable, but I couldn't satisfy all the dependencies. What is the point of having an RPM if it can't be installed? Debian allowed me to install a ton of stuff with apt-get that I was having to download tarballs to try install. I admit I *love* debian
Re:Well ... (Score:3, Informative)
Do you honestly think STABLE is supposed to have 3 year old packages in it? This is the oldest, most out of date STABLE we've ever had.
It's not old because "that's how you keep it stable"
It's old because of an organization
How many boxes do you admin? (Score:3, Insightful)
How many other employees depend on your systems to get their work done? How many CUSTOMERS depend on your systems? How many of these systems do you have immediate access to if there's a problem, vs. systems colocated at ISPs so you have thick pipes to the internet?
I know, you referred to "rock solid" stable. You're right about that, but wrong that that's only servers with heavy loads. Anything that others depend on
Re:Well ... (Score:2)
Its behind on kernel releases, I need 2.6.11 to support my USB drive and the best Ubuntu has is 2.6.11.1, and Ubunto doesn't even have Firefox 1.03 out yet.
Previous to that I was using a de-mepis'd Mepis become testing/unstable and it was very stable. (Mepis was also falling behind the times)
My testing/unstable was running recent 2.6.11 releases and doing well.
So I didn'
Re:Well ... (Score:2)
</paraphrase>
(Or maybe you could try running testing? It works fine, you know.)
Re:Well ... (Score:2)
Exactly. I hear everyone yelling to just use testing/unstable. But seriously, if those are really that solid, make a new release! If they're not, then the entire process is indeed painfully slow and the distro will likely wither and die.
I'm also reading here that the guy didn't actually say they're "broke". Which is good, because I'd choke if I heard about a volunteer project with no expenses crying elephant tears over only 40k.
Re:Well ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people I know well who use linux run Debian sarge, or a hybrid system, including me. (That's about four or five people.) It still works great for a personal workstation and whatever the label, it is relatively stable compared with some other distros.
Support isn't an issue because it's a personal workstation in a distro that's realisically aimed at people who have some level of technical competancy to manage their systems and resolve problems from time to time. If you can deal with the package maintainers and the upstream developers, let alone post the odd question in a forum, you're still getting large amounts of unofficial support that (in most cases) beats anything official.
The installer isn't an issue because, for me at least, it's already installed... and the unofficial Debian installer (in sarge) is still quite reasonable if it isn't perfect.
As another response said, I really don't get this attitude. Debian might not be the best distro for you, or "stable" Debian might not be the best distro for you, and there are certainly some policies that may need reviewing for the future.
Claiming it's going to die, however, just because you personally and friends in your local community see no use for it, is silly. Sarge is still a perfectly workable and mostly up-to-date distro for a lot of people, even if it's somehow trendy on slashdot to bash the project right now. For many, including myself, making it officially stable is irrelevant. All that will do from my perspective is allow for some new packages to flood into testing and unstable.
Save the money! (Score:5, Funny)
They should save it up. At 2% interest, they'll double their money by the next release.
Truth be told... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it would be better if they set their developers to specific tasks for the betterment of their distrobution with that money than simply hold on to it and wait for that eventual rainy day though.
Re:Truth be told... (Score:2, Insightful)
"I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise."
It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000 number without understanding it in terms of their expenses. Is Debian a US corporation? A LLC? A NPO? What does $40,000 represent?
I'm sure you could find all kinds of businesses that don't keep $40,000 in a cash fund.
About donating to Debian (Score:5, Informative)
The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org [debian.org] are this one [debian.org] listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page [debian.org] saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest [spi-inc.org] and the Free Software Foundation [fsf.org]
Sensationalistic article (Score:5, Informative)
Here are a few facts:
1) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), has held roughly the same amount of money (USD 40,000) in trust for Debian since as far back as the middle of the year 2001 (when I became SPI Treasurer and began receiving the monthly and quarterly statements from the financial institutions where that money is kept). It is therefore difficult to conclude any more of a cash crisis for Debian now than there was four years ago.
2) SPI is not the only organization that holds assets in trust for Debian. As noted in my first DPL report (linked from the
3) People should read the internetnews.com article, also linked from the
12:43 INTERVIEWER: In your Debian Project Leader report for 2005-04-24, you provide status on the state of Debian's assets. On the surface it doesn't look like debian has "much" in the way of cash assets now - is that a problem for Debian? If so, how will you try and "fix" the problem?
12:44 ME: can you clarify the question? "much" relative to what?
12:45 INTERVIEWER: by "much" i'm refering to the fact that commercial distros (Red Hat etc) have xx millions in the bank - so in comparison it doesn't look (to a layperson) like Debian has "much" in terms of cash assets
12:45 INTERVIEWER: does that help?
12:45 ME: ah, compared to a commercial interest.
12:45 ME: yes, it does help.
12:47 ME: Because Debian is a non-commercial, not-for-profit entity which derives most of its value from the donated labor of hundreds of individuals, I think it stands to reason that our books wouldn't look like those of a publicly-traded, incorporated body which has labor and capital expenditures.
12:48 ME: I think there are several reasons Debian doesn't have much in the way of cash assets relative to a for-profit Free Software company, though.
12:49 ME: 1) Debian has no source revenue apart from fund-raising, which to date has been regularly undertaken at trade shows, to those who happen to pass by our booth.
12:49 ME: s/source/& of/
12:50 ME: 2) Debian tends to spend its cash assets, at least in the United States, approximately as fast as they come in.
12:51 ME: 3) There have been conflicting ideas among Debian developers in the past over whether Debian *should* attempt to accumulate a war chest of cash reserves.
12:51 ME: An argument in favor of that is that we should do so in the event we, or one of our developers, is sued for doing something we consider legitimate, like offering freely-modifiable software gratis to the world.
12:51 ME: s/is sued/are sued/
[the interviewer moved on, but we came back to this subject at the end of the interview]
13:03 ME: okay. Reasons *not* to build up a war chest...
13:04 ME: Two arguments against building up a "war chest" are 1) actually having a large quanitity of liquid assets is felt to make us a more inviting target for lawsuits, because there is the possibility of damages on top of injunctions;
13:05 ME: 2) People who donate us money, by and large, seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near term, not towards establishing an endowment.
13:05 ME: In my years on the SPI Board and as
Re:Sensationalistic article (Score:4, Interesting)
And in relation to deciding for ourselves, you have a good point about slashdot. But this fits into a wider pattern of editorial behaviour that was always present, but has amped up recently, which is to post "troll" articles which will cause much furore in the linux community.
Yes, Slashdot has always had such things. But I believe there is a deliberate editorial policy now to post such things. In addition, I think there are submitters who know this. In addition I think there are journalists on tech news sites who know they can troll linux with a "omg not ready for the desktop" or somesuch and likely get linked to and have a storm of click-throughs (from which they derive their money remember).
So tech journalists, submitters and editors all have a vested interest in these "troll" articles to the detriment of well formed and intelligent debate. It's getting almost as bad as GNAA and other troll groups whose stated goals are to cause controversy and not add any "signal" (as in signal to noise) to the slashdot. So basically the editors are doing the trolls jobs for them (or is it the other way around?).
It's why I block slashdot ads, and why I will never subscribe. I encourage others to do the same.
Re:Sensationalistic article (Score:2)
Re:Sensationalistic article (Score:2)
thanks.
Re:Sensationalistic article (Score:2)
Broke? (Score:4, Interesting)
40k - (cost of releasing) = ? (Score:5, Informative)
Used to be, when the people I knew who knew what they were talking about talked about linux, they probably were talking about Debian GNU/Linux.
Things are changing. More and more smart folks I know are frustrated. Most Open source projects are using a "release early and release often" mentality that is a stark contrast to Debian's recent "don't release at all" policy.
Yes, there is always unstable for those that want the latest(ish) versions of things. That's really not the point, as I see it. People are frustrated with the lack of movement, the apparent lack of progress towards getting any new features into stable, even if they arentt the very latest. I think at some point, many people just like to feel like their system is getting new software even if they don't use any new features at all.
Maybe the negative stuff I read on /. and here tossed around between friends is not accurate. Things might not really be as stagnate as they seem from a common user's prespective. But that Debian has gone from a Good Thing to a bit of a joke amongst the sys admins I respect makes me concerned about it's future.
There are some distro's out there that are attempting to fill the void that debian has created, and some are starting to do a good job of it. A world where a debian based distro replaces a bulk of the debian based users is not hard to imagine right now. What happens to debian then? And what happens to a debian based distro when debian doesn't have users?
It could work out great for almost everyone except the actual debian project. i think everyone in a position of influence there needs to compare the costs of addressing the current perception one way or another to the cost of bascially becoming irrelevant.
I hope I am still enjoying doing my work with debian systems many years from now, but I am starting to wonder if I won't be working on some (probably debian based) alternative instead.
well thats my rant, please forgive any spelling mistakes or generally stupid things I might have said. I'm not one of the smart ones.
Will you people please decide what you want? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are right about the first. Debian is probably the easiest distro to upgrade and maintain. Part of the secret is apt, that's true, but only a small part. The main reason debian "just works" and is so easy to maintain is the official repositories. You don't have dependency problems in debian (most of the time) because debian developers took enormous care to resolve all the dependency problems for you. Debian carefully backports(!) all security fixes they can, making sure that nothing breaks in the process, so that if there is a security hole fixed in say php, all your pages will just keep working like before. They have more packages than most other distros pot together, and they run on more hardware than enybody else. All this just takes some time.
I am not afraid debian will become irrelevant. There is a reason all these new distros are based on debian. And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian. Debian stable may not be the system for a hobbyist's desktop, but a large company or city or whatnot does not care about frequent releases. On the contrary, the longer they can go without major update the better. And when the update actually does come, debian makes it easy with their repositories, their stable/testing/unstable system, and apt.
And if you are a hobbyist, use testing/unstable and contribute your share. Debian is a community, not a company, and if use debian, you are part of the community. You want releases to happen more often? Then do your share. Do you use testing or unstable? Submit bug reports, fixes, if you are not a programmer, fix or update some bloody documentation, provide some missing icons, whatever! The only way debian can become irrelevant or obsolete is if we let it go irrelevant or obsolete.
Re:Will you people please decide what you want? (Score:2)
Uhm, it's not Debian but SuSE.
Re:Will you people please decide what you want? (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux's management system back to bite them (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Hardware support. Unlike Windows, you can't drop in a 3rd party driver, you need to upgrade the whole kernel. This is by design (no stable ABI).
2. Inability to update core systems. No software is ever officially "adopted" into stable. Why? Dependencies. Imagine if they could say "this version of [core software] is now so stable, we'll provide equal support with the original in stable".
Debian stable is only good for systems that have been virtually unchanged since release, both when it comes to hardware and software. Hey if it works, don't break it. But what can Debian offer for new servers?
The new "stable" will fall into the same obscurity if the same release system keeps up. They should try to support 10000 packages/3yrs + 20 extra releases of core apps/6mo, not just 10000 packages every three years. Server apps don't have that insanely many deps as desktops.
Hardware, well that's just not easy with the current model. But solving half the problem is better than solving none of it.
Kjella
Re:40k - (cost of releasing) = ? (Score:2)
What if I wanted STABLE? That's important for many, but Woody contains so ancient versions of packages that it's mostly useless. Sid works 99.9% of the time because it contains software with newly fixed bugs. Woody survives 90% cases maybe - old bugs still present, new hardware, new protocols, new requirements of the real world just make it obsolete.
We don't need another "unstable" release. But what about finally releasing an up-to-date STABLE one where reliablity
Debian, the fossil (Score:2, Troll)
dancing around the obvious (Score:2)
intereting part (Score:2)
sadly those days may be closer than we all think - especially if all the "intellectual property/patent lawyers" have their way in the US.
please UK do not adopt software patents. there is no need for them and they are totally ridiculous.
Re:Umm, yeah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Debian is dying. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:$40K?! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Informative)
Since the "stable" was released, a lot of apps included in it have been released in newer "stable" versions with numerous bugfixes - so instead of getting pre-alpha quality package from "Stable" (which was included because it was the only thing that was there at that time) I force upgrade to "1.0 stable" version from the "unstable" tree, because it's a year old and proven to be stable, as opposed to 5 years old, pre-alpha. Recently installed Dosemu from the stable tree, for some important work that could be done only with certain ancient DOS application. It kept crashing. Unstable Dosemu worked like a charm - bug fixed.
Because of this ages-long release cycle, there's NO REASON TO USE STABLE at all. Because it still has bugs that have been fixed years ago in other releases, making it LESS stable than most newer "unstable" distros.
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
though, with unstable you might need to mess with the configuration every so often(not that it really happens that often but...).
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
Re:Debian's appeal (Score:2, Informative)
In my opinion I prefer Debian for systems that I have to support myself, and Redhat for systems that need third party support for whatever reasons.
The nice thing about Debian is that you generally know that everything 'just works' by default. There is a lot of setup, but it's pretty rare that you have to monkey around with stuff like applying patches and recompiling software or writing your own init scripts.
And if you do run into problems then it's not long before you get a updat
Re:Debian's appeal (Score:2)
I made the mistake of installing Sarge thinking that it was only a couple months away from release--that was last year...and I have to pin Testing with Unstable branch just to get all the security updates in a timely fashion--it defeats the purpose using Debian as a server...
Man, what's your problem? You are preferring over unsupported distro of another. De