Debian Turns 30 (debian.org) 33
Debian blog: Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release." He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection. Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today.
Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft.
Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft.
OMG (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my god. I'm older than Debian...
Re:OMG (Score:5, Funny)
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I remember my first install (Score:5, Insightful)
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Amen to this!
2000 me, I think...?
I popped in a net install floppy and booted from that and magically downloaded a full system from the internet.
Re:I remember my first install (Score:5, Interesting)
I also came from Slackware primarily because of apt. I have examined other options since, but never seriously. Then I got old and lazy, now my desktops run on Linux Mint Debian Edition, while other machines still run pure Debian.
Re:I remember my first install (Score:4, Interesting)
I went the opposite direction. Stated with SUSE which I purchased from Barns and Noble in 2003/2004. Couldn't get it to play nice with my extra video card (it kept picking the motherboard one instead of the nvidia one). Switched to Mepis and fell in love with Debian.
A few years later, I realized how much easier it was to just install minimal debian and add the packages I wanted rather then removing tons of packages from my Mepis install and I have never looked back.
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Another ex Slacker here - switched at 14.2 when the joy of custom compiling much of my software had lost its luster (SlackBuilds had just begun back then). Debian Stable seemed like a good no-nonsense distro. What I liked in both cases was that if something was broken it was always me that broke it, so it was also always me that could fix it.
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I moved from Slackware earlier, apt was still a promise though dselect and dpkg worked well enough. Other then the hassle of the libc5 to glib upgrade, it was wonderful being able to so simply upgrade.
It had some cool advantages over Slackware... (Score:5, Informative)
When Debian came out, a lot of people were on Slackware or on SLS. At the time, if you wanted to upgrade a package, it was either grabbing a tarball, or building it from source (although with almost everything, "./configure; make; make install" deployed pretty much any GNU package without having to chase down dependency after dependency.) What Red Hat and Debian brought was a nice way to install and update packages, as well as a clean way to remove them. Yes, you could use scripting like listing all files in a tarball and removing them, but if there was something shared, that wouldn't work.
Overall, Debian has remained strong, but without the fanfare that Ubuntu has, and Red Hat used to have. It works well, isn't dependent on snaps, and often times winds up a base distribution for appliances, like TrueNAS SCALE (TrueNAS CORE is FreeBSD, but SCALE is Debian), Proxmox, and other items.
It works and works well, and is definitely a rock solid distribution.
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I have it under good authority that Debian is dead, and everyone has moved to BSD and Devuan because of something to do with some guy people hate. Was that just all nonsense?
Re:It had some cool advantages over Slackware... (Score:4, Funny)
Was that just all nonsense?
"Never believe everything you read on the Internet." -Abraham Lincoln
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I started using Debian in 1996.
Debian is less relevant than it was, because it has become another vehicle for distributing Poettering's malware.
Debian apparently claimed to respect freedom of choice for init systems, then didn't follow through.
If you want a .deb-based distribution that doesn't have that bloat, Devuan is the place.
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Do you seriously mean that Debian is less relevant due to systemd? You think Devuan is more relevant then Debian?
That list of distros using systemd includes Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch, and Amazon Linux.
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systemd doesn't make a distribution great.
It makes it bloated and divergent from the Unix philosophy [wikipedia.org].
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Even though the systemd thing is a long since beaten dead horse, I've wondered about how hard it would be to replace systemd with something functionally identical... something that groks manifests, sets limits, and allows for parallel loading and stopping of daemons... but more modular and far less code needed. Something designed where it does not have access to the network, and also is thoroughly audited. By going back to the Unix Way (tm), one can still have the usefulness of systemd, but not worry abou
Systemd vs anything else (Score:2)
Ubuntu had upstart, OSX has launchd, Solaris had SMF
Solaris supported mixing with SysV stuff, but was hard to convert
Systemd is easy to convert SysV, but doesn't support mixing reliably
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Operating system of choice: https://antixlinux.com/ [antixlinux.com]
If I must run something with systemd I use: https://mxlinux.org/ [mxlinux.org]
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I thought that Netcraft confirmed quite the opposite about BSD about 20 years ago, or am I not remembering that meme correctly?
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"I have it under good authority that Debian is dead"
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
Re: It had some cool advantages over Slackware... (Score:2)
The idea that it's been abandoned because of it is a dumb one, but there is certainly a segment that has gone another way. But I for one didn't go far, just to Devuan. You can actually just change your init system in Debian after install, but that leaves you doing a lot of stuff that Devuan has already done, so why?
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Re: It had some cool advantages over Slackware... (Score:2)
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...isn't dependent on snaps....
I'm finding the self-contained application packages, such as snap, to be a godsend that I wish all developers would adopt. My latest push involves Makehuman. I used it extensively on Ubuntu 20.04, but found, after upgrading one of my workstations to 22.04, that it doesn't have a package for the new Ubuntu. And it appears as though it may never get one. A single snap would cover all distributions, making upgrades easy.
I needed the latest Blender, and downloading the snap package was not only easy for me, bu
The word "primeval" comes to mind (Score:3)
I have installed every version of debian except 1. (Score:1)
Who is old? (Score:2)
oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today.
Nice topic for a flame war. According to Wikipedia
Now let's hear a ridiculous thread about who is non free among the free
I use arch btw (Score:1)