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Because Debian is not owned by a corporation. Who knows what IBM will do with Red Hat. We all know that massive corps that buy smaller ones usually don't treat

Because Debian is not owned by a corporation. Who knows what IBM will do with Red Hat. We all know that massive corps that buy smaller ones usually don't treat the smaller corps very well. They often buy them for the patent portfolio or tech, merge it in or kill it outright after a time. While Red Hat has determined (sadly) the overall direction of Linux development with things like systemd (don't get anyone started on this one), PulseAudio, et al, does anyone not think this will not end up tragically? Independent distros like Debian (who sadly adopted systemd) and Slackware (now the oldest continually developed distro, and thankfully not using systemd) need to exist. Linux hackers, both pro and amateur, need a place to tinker that is not always being broken. Both Debian and Slackware are fairly conservative distros that have a long development time. I for one favor this long development time for things I need to be rock solid. Look at the development space as well as PaaS, Web hosting, etc. Ubuntu dominates this space. With one exception: people that need CPanel. Ubuntu is generally faster, all things considered, and definitely easier to use, upgrade, and maintain.

ilovecaching 8y ago
But most of the linux kernel hackers run Fedora (Linus) or work for Redhat (Dave). Linux specifically uses Fedora because it just works. I'm also not sure what you mean by faster? There's a lot of factors in play in terms of OS efficiency and benchmarking is hard. Like I said, I do think that Ubuntu dominates small business, but large businesses still focus on RHEL. Cloud has just made numbers like number of installs easier to track. I wouldn't necessarily say that number of installs really even matters compared to what those installs are being used for, and how much clout Canonical has in the Linux community versus Redhat. Redhat directly employees a ton of critical people in standard Linux projects like freedesktop etc.

ilovecaching 8y ago

But most of the linux kernel hackers run Fedora (Linus) or work for Redhat (Dave). Linux specifically uses Fedora because it just works. I'm also not sure what you mean by faster? There's a lot of factors in play in terms of OS efficiency and benchmarking is hard. Like I said, I do think that Ubuntu dominates small business, but large businesses still focus on RHEL. Cloud has just made numbers like number of installs easier to track. I wouldn't necessarily say that number of installs really even matters compared to what those installs are being used for, and how much clout Canonical has in the Linux community versus Redhat. Redhat directly employees a ton of critical people in standard Linux projects like freedesktop etc.