Why Debian Matters More Than Ever

Julie188 writes "If you look at the feature list for Debian 6, released on February 6, it's easy to be underwhelmed. This is especially true when measuring Debian against its offspring, like Ubuntu. Debian doesn't get much credit, and its become trendy for industry pundits to claim it's become irrelevant. But it's more relevant than ever. If you're using Ubuntu (or Linux Mint, or Mepis...), you're really using Debian with some enhancements. According to a presentation given recently by Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli, only 7% of Ubuntu is directly derived from upstream projects, Canonical's projects, or other non-Debian sources. Of the rest, 74% of Ubuntu is rebuilt Debian packages, and 18% are patched and rebuilt Debian packages."

Re:Since when?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously nobody important. Ubuntu is more like extended Debian family. They even contribute back to Debian. Heck, I even use the Wine packages from an Ubuntu PPA (Lucid) unmodified. Would it make sense to say that Ubuntu is irrelevant if Kubuntu became a big deal? No. This is just stirring up an anthill.

Debian still supports PowerPC

[joeyadams]

Debian is one of the last major Linux distros still supporting PowerPC (along with Gentoo, Arch Linux PPC [archlinuxppc.org], and a few others). Ubuntu discontinued official PowerPC support in 2007, and Fedora did the same in 2010. I'm tempted to install Debian 6 on my Apple eMac, replacing Fedora 12 (which reached EOL a couple months ago).

Re:Debia what?

[Nemyst]

Is this supposed to be sarcastic?

Debian is not Ubuntu's grandparent, that's a really bad analogy. If anything, Ubuntu's a leech (a very pretty leech, yes) to Debian. It's more of a symbiotic relationship than a true leech, but Ubuntu would have a very hard time to move forward without Debian's foundation and the work done by Debian developers. Chances are a LOT of Debian updates find their way into Ubuntu, so when the former updates, the latter benefits from it.

If Debian died today all the sudden, Ubuntu wouldn't grind to a halt, but it'd be struggling to keep its pace.

Re:Since when?

[foxed]

Steven Vaughan-Nichols is calling it "no longer as important as it once was". See http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-new-debian-linux-irrelevant/8218 [zdnet.com]

My mum says...

[Beowulf878]

"this is obvious."

Since I put debian 6 on her laptop - the frequency of ubuntu updates annoyed her, and she refused to install them (windows failed her long ago - even without viruses the spyware slowed it to a crawl) - she thinks it matters a lot. And who am I to argue...?

I am slightly amused by all the insistence on its geek credentials. For the above installation I put the installation CD in and essentially pressed return until a working desktop came up. I admit I had to type 2 user names and passwords, but I didn't find it too onerous. For my other machines I might do other things - but that is me complicating matters and nothing inherently to do with debian. It seems all my hardware is so old now, it just works out of the box.

{Kindly refrain from posting "j00r m0m" jokes... heard them all before... really. Not a challenge, either.}