Happy birthday, old steady. I haven't always been faithful, but always end up coming back to Debian--it was the first distro I could stand to use (after attempting floppy-based Slack, net-install FreeBSD before I knew how to netinstall over a dialup connection, a brief experience in learning how awful RPMs were, and then the absolutely fantastic magic that was and still is Apt), and it's the only one I can ever stand to use for more than a few months.
Happy 20th birthday Debian
51–60 of 91 posts
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#52I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…
Be careful with taking that too far ;). That modularity and customizability was slippery slope for me--I defected from Debian to Arch in months.
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#53Debian was my first linux distribution. It took me perhaps a week to download the 7 CDs for Woody (I don't think many of them ever actually got used). I was only 12 and really didn't have a clue what I was doing. My main memories are probably more of frustration than enlightenment... However, as the basis of Knoppix (the first linux distribution that I had much success with) it was a huge pillar in my (and no doubt m…
I started hacking around in linux at 12 too!
Same here. Although I can't call it hacking. I lived in the middle of nowhere (tech wise, 30k people town in Lithuania) and somehow I found a book (probably the only one about Linux in my native language at that time) about Mandriva with a CD attached to it. Have no idea what that book was doing there in the local book store. Usually it were a dozen of random IT books and they had 1-2 copies of each. After a couple of tries, I installed it. Didn't have any clue what I was doing (I just heard that Linux was a cool thing) but that's how it's started... :)
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#54I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…
Be careful with taking that too far ;). That modularity and customizability was slippery slope for me--I defected from Debian to Arch in months.
And you know what comes next after Arch...
...Gentoo.
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#55Just recently switched to Debian for a server distro. Early in my linux learning, I had been messing around with Gentoo, Fedora, and even Ubuntu. It's taken me so long to understand what Debian is and how important good package management is, but now I'm grateful. Thanks Debian!
Please share what you found out. What characteristics of Debian make it a better server OS than Ubuntu or CentOS?
Ubuntu's stated focus from the outset is making an enduser distro. Their success in mindshare made them popular in the server arena, but there are little things here and there where it falls behind. Making a server not based on an LTS version is one early trap to fall into (all debian versions are effectively LTS), but more importantly, debian is not fond of retrograde breakages. Ubuntu is much more of a moving target than debian - when you want to find out how to do something, it often changes between releases (one mildly common desktop task (which I can't recall at the moment :/ ) had five different ways to do it over the past five releases...). There's more unique stuff in ubuntu - like upstart, a core feature which no-one else uses - and that reduces your troubleshooting info pool. Ubuntu also has lots of automagic-helpery stuff, which is good for an end-user distro, but gets in the way a little on a server. One example is the 'did you mean?' thing when you make a shell typo. That consumes time and is pointless on a server.
I'm not particularly familiar with CentOS. I've been an apt user since rediscovering linux, and every time I venture onto an rpm-based system, yum just spews hard-to-read crap at me. It feels like rearranging deck chairs, so I head back to what I know.
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#56Next year we'll take Debian out and get it shitfaced.
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful with taking that too far ;). That modularity and customizability was slippery slope for me--I defected from Debian to Arch in months.
And you know what comes next after Arch... ...Gentoo.
I chose FreeBSD... I wish that I would have tried FreeBSD years sooner, but I guess it's better late than never.
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slackware's 20th birthday was just last month! It's a little hard to view in landscape mode but Wikipedia has this cool graphic to show the development of Linux distros.
Apparently dozing and posting doesn't work. Here's the graphic I was talking about: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...
Very neat indeed, though its sheer size seemed to cause indigestion in every app I tried to display it with (they could display it OK, but try to zoom in/out and prepare to wait...).
It would be even cooler if there was some indication of popularity over time as well, e.g. via variation in line thickness or something (...image gets even bigger... ><).
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first release was Potato. I still remember downloading so many (3? 6?) CDs... God, I feel old. I don't use Debian much these days, certainly not as a desktop, but it will forever be the "real" Linux distribution in my heart. Without the ongoing work of umpteen Debian package managers, you wouldn't have Ubuntu (and all its humongous downstream), Knoppix, and so on.
The first Debian "release" I installed was called "Slink-and-a-half." It was Slink with some important Potato packages backported by VA Linux. I quickly upgraded it using dist-upgrade to unstable, which was potato at the time (testing didn't exist yet).
I built "slink and a half" and I'm lying in a tent in a field in Switzerland after the main Debian b-day party, bonfire, triple rainbow (no kidding!), etc. Wave!
Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian
#60I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…
I switched to Debian (Wheezy specifically) after 8 or so years of using Fedora (initially Fedora Core) with a year or two of Gentoo in 2008-9 or so. It really is a breath of fresh air.
You don't realize it initially but Fedora/Ubuntu are suffocating.. rapid releases changing things that didn't need to be changed (I have zero objection to actual improvements, that is the reason I used Fedora for so long (and Gentoo during a time I wasn't satisfied with Fedora's ability to keep up)), focus on the "standard" experience causing unnecessary breakage, etc.
Now I just sit on Debian, look at the other distros, and scratch my head. It seems like they are expending so much effort just spinning their tires. A new Fedora graphical installer? You're only going to use that once, and the existing one wasn't broken! Ubuntu on phones? You haven't even figured out how to get "regular" people to use it on desktops yet where your competition is mostly windows... now you want to compete with iOS and android?
Maybe they are getting somewhere, but it sure as hell appears to be inefficient. Ease off the throttle and do things right.