6 ms·

The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. Debian has existed for quite some time without any need for a corporati

by kodah 6y ago

The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. Debian has existed for quite some time without any need for a corporation. Are there problems? Yes, but Debian isn't going to suddenly announce that it's going to kill itself either. I would suggest getting involved in the Debian community (without trying to take it over), and making meaningful contributions. If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations.

erichocean 6y ago
> The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. If you pay for software, like we do in VFX/Animation, then RHEL is basically the standard and what's supported best.
- csdreamer7 6y ago
  Would you write out more about that? I would assume Windows is the standard for workstations.
  - alrs 6y ago
    Standard? Someone in vfx would have to answer that, but my understanding is: not really. There is a lot of vfx work that happens on Linux workstations. https://vfxplatform.com/about/ https://vfxplatform.com/about/
    - PowerBar 6y ago
      In the VFX environments I've seen (100+ artists), most artist workstations and servers are Linux (usually RHEL or CentOS due to much higher rpm than deb support in the industry). Macs are common for editors (who use the Adobe suite to make timelines for dailies) and producers (because shiny), while Windows is mainly used by admin staff (accounting, hr, etc) because they use the same terrible accounting software as every other company out there (note: this may be less so now with the move to web based solutions). While most hobby level video software is targeted at windows or Mac, the truly powerful stuff (houdini, maya, nuke, blender) are first class citizens on Linux. Currently one of the few artist programs that aren't available for Linux is the adobe suite which is mostly used by editors (for timelines) and photo editing (for promotional material) and most of that happens on Macs, usually in the editing department. Something to keep in mind is that many VFX shops are kind of specialized and will work on very specific portions of a movie or TV show. For example, the company that owns the final product (Disney, Fox, MGM, etc) will pay company A to shoot the movie, then company A will send the footage for a 30 second scene to company B to rotoscope everything, then it gets sent to company C for VFX elements, then to company D for 3d conversion, then to company E for lighting and finally to company F for audio and final stitching. This is repeated (often with different companies A-F) for each scene since different scenes required different levels of expertise in different areas such as crowd generation, fire simulation, raindrop removal (yes, it's as painful as it sounds), background replacement, CG helicopters, etc. Because of this, the few steps that require windows are typically handled by 1 or 2 companies so the rest only need enough Mac/Windows machines for their local editors to stick timelines together for daily reviews. An interesting side effect of the above is that almost every company you see in the credits of a movie had no idea what the dialog was because audio is one of the last things that gets added and completely bypasses 90% of the VFX houses involved.
  - mroche 6y ago
    In addition to the other responses, the VFX community has strong roots coming in the SGI/IRIX days. When those platforms started to decline due to competition from modern commodity hardware among other reasons, Linux offered the best path of migration from both a hardware support perspective and reasonable compatibility with existing pipelines and tools (the latter being very important). Red Hat became a sort of de facto at that point. ^ This is what I have been told by my older colleagues; I wasn’t around for this. My current employer danced around with RHL and Fedora Core before moving to CentOS 6 (now 7, and looking at what to do with 8). Pretty much all studios using Linux in this industry are running RHEL/CentOS, with a very small handful operating on Ubuntu. Home users will do whatever they want and deal with whatever incompatibilities arise ;)
vultour 6y ago
So companies should expect OSS maintainers to provide the same level of service that a RedHat subscription does if they donate?
- bityard 6y ago
  Who is suggesting that?
  - nvr219 6y ago
    I am
    - pabs3 6y ago
      It may not be to the level of support that RedHat provides, but Debian does provide gratis support and there are consultancies providing paid support: https://www.debian.org/support https://www.debian.org/support https://www.debian.org/consultants/ https://www.debian.org/consultants/
tootie 6y ago
I don't see a lot of production workloads running debian unless it's a Ubuntu which is backed by canonical.
- curt15 6y ago
  Google's production servers run a customised version of Debian https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/presentation/merlin https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/...
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    Also desktops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux
- GordonS 6y ago
  I know you mean in terms of host OS, but as an aside, loads of Docker images are based on the "slim" Debian images.
- eloff 6y ago
  I see you've been downvoted, but this statement is true. Ubuntu on both servers and desktop is far more popular than debian. Popular is not always a good proxy for better, but in this case following a well tread path is advantageous when you run into trouble.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Is there anything Ubuntu-specific in Ubuntu these days (other than process stuff, like release cycle)? Or is it just Debian with commercial support and branding?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  Considering that Ubuntu is a superset of Debian, then yes you do see lots of debian production workloads Personally, I used to support a $25m/yr business on a cluster of Debian servers, which itself supported about 1000 remote field installations, also running Debian. Let me tell you, Debian was the least of my troubles in that job. It really did just work
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
The Linux kernel itself is corporate backed.
- emilsedgh 6y ago
  There is a difference between corporate backed and being owned and operated by a corporation. Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE are owned by companies. That ownership is more than just trademarks. The own the trademark and are the sole decision makers.
eloff 6y ago
> If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations. How is that as useful to you personally as a support subscription? You can't replace a support contract with wishful thinking and a donation. It's great to support open source projects, but lets not mix concerns here.
TylerE 6y ago
Debian is in fact incorporated. "Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit corporation based in the United States of America, founded by Debian people in 1997 to help free software/hardware organisations." It owns the various Debian trademarks, etc.
- kodah 6y ago
  There is a massive difference between a company that manages trademarks and a for-profit business that depends entirely on gatekeeping behind a subscription and support contract. Before someone brings up Fedora, RHEL exercises ultimate control over that too. Think about that, RHEL owns the trademark to Fedora. Feel free to browse their board too. You can argue that Ubuntu provides a counter model to RHEL where only services and select products require a subscription but the OS is otherwise free.
- pabs3 6y ago
  There are actually several non-profits holding Debian assets, in years with a physical DebConf usually a new or existing organisation is enlisted to hold funds for that conference. https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Treasurer/Organizations https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Treasurer/Organizations https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/TrustedOrganizationCriteria https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/TrustedOrganizationCriteri...
JeremyNT 6y ago
Debian is amazing, and sadly often overlooked. I was always a little confused by how popular Ubuntu became. Canonical never did much to add value, often replacing more standard tools with strange canonical replacements that didn't survive the test of time. If you use Ubuntu now, give Debian a try. The stability and community are really second to none. For all my personal use I run Arch, but I would not hesitate to run Debian in production instead of a commercial distribution.
- krupan 6y ago
  When Ubuntu came out, Debian was notoriously difficult to install. The joke was that Ubuntu was the African word for, "can't install Debian."
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian. Before that I was on FreeBSD, and before that I was in Slackware. All were always fine What does “difficult to install” even mean?
    - alrs 6y ago
      fighting with XF86Config, hoping not to fry your monitor.
      - jbverschoor 6y ago
        Well, that was with any dist, and not really a Debian issue. Besides, last time I ran a GUI on linux was probably over 20 years ago.
        alrs 6y ago
        What complicated it is that usually when you were coming to Debian you were coming from Slackware or a BSD, so everything you knew about init systems and software distribution went out the window. Where's rc.local? Why did ./configure && make && make install destroy my system? Also: we're talking about 20 years ago: everything was harder then.
tempfs 6y ago
Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had Debian stable go wrong in any application[server,desktop,laptops or raspian]. I use it everywhere and it is pretty fantastic. Despite Debian being phenomenal in many ways, it doesn't offer up a head for the chopping block to replace yours if things go wrong in a corporate application. Good luck getting IT folks to deploy anything that doesn't offer them an out. Using CentOS knowing that it is downstream from RedHat but that RedHat would step up and fix things in a semi-timely manner was good enough for many enterprises....at least until IBM got involved. Ubuntu is also a weird choice generally speaking because Ubuntu just uses Debian's testing repo as a base and really only significantly varies in the kernels that they roll for various products/services.[cloud,live patching,etc.] They used to maintain their own desktop[Unity] and service management[upstart] and a bunch more variances from Debian...but that ain't really the case today.
- pabs3 6y ago
  Ubuntu is actually based on Debian unstable, they do their own QA rather than relying on the Debian's testing migration QA.
- chaz6 6y ago
  Debian was responsible for one of the, if not the, biggest security disasters in Linux distributions' history. A Debian developer thought they knew better than the OpenSSL developers and made a change that compromised every SSH and SSH private key you generated. https://threatpost.com/how-debian-openssl-bug-almost-spawned-disaster-051809/72669/ https://threatpost.com/how-debian-openssl-bug-almost-spawned...
  - kodah 6y ago
    I remember this bug. It was what made my interest in systems engineering soar. Unfortunately your characterization of it falls quite short. Here's the mailing list email that inspired the bug: https://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2 I kind of doubt that some guy that thinks he "knows better than the OpenSSL developers" is saying things like this on their mailing list: > What I currently see as best option is to actually comment out those 2 lines of code. But I have no idea what effect this really has on the RNG. The only effect I see is that the pool might receive less entropy. But on the other hand, I'm not even sure how much entropy some unitialised data has. The result was something like 32k sources of entropy which is not enough. Here's the bug Kurt was trying to fix: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=363516 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=363516
krupan 6y ago
Apples and oranges. Corporations that feel they need Enterprise Support, either for the OS itself, or for software that runs on the OS (commercial databases, engineering tools, etc.), pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Or, if they were small just feeling like throwing caution to the wind, they would use Centos (and not tell anyone that it wasn't actually Red Hat). These are businesses and software that used to run only on commercial UNIX operating systems. People tried selling Enterprise Support for Debian back even before Red Hat went commercial, if I remember correctly, but somehow Red Hat timed their effort right and became the defacto replacement for UNIX in these environments.
sjansen 6y ago
From a business perspective, the biggest problem I've experienced with community-based distributions is the limited support cycle. Debian averages about 3 years with LTS, which is really good for for a community distro but really short for a commercial distro. Updating a personal server every 6 months may be easy, but in a mature business it often makes sense to wait 5 years or more before upgrading certain infrastructure so that time and effort can be invested in other areas instead.
- derekp7 6y ago
  Is that still the case with cloud-first, software-defined infrastructure, and IAAS? Even in non-cloud environments you have pets vs. cattle, with the cattle hopefully out-numbering pets. So your data sits off in a storage device, and gets attached to containers running on an OS that is built from a kickstart or similar install. In that case you can spin up VMs running any OS version, make sure you can deploy your containers on it, test it, and off you go. The days of having a fleet of servers that were carefully hand-crafted and evolved over the years are hopefully coming to a close.
snicker7 6y ago
You might be thinking as a technologist rather than as a business person. Debian is great, but there is no accountability if things go wrong. Accountability and QA may be worth the licensing costs, even if 100% of the software is "free".

by kodah 6y ago

erichocean 6y ago

> The weird thing here is the consistent recommendation of corporate backed distributions. If you pay for software, like we do in VFX/Animation, then RHEL is basically the standard and what's supported best.

csdreamer7 6y ago
Would you write out more about that? I would assume Windows is the standard for workstations.
- alrs 6y ago
  Standard? Someone in vfx would have to answer that, but my understanding is: not really. There is a lot of vfx work that happens on Linux workstations. https://vfxplatform.com/about/ https://vfxplatform.com/about/
  - PowerBar 6y ago
    In the VFX environments I've seen (100+ artists), most artist workstations and servers are Linux (usually RHEL or CentOS due to much higher rpm than deb support in the industry). Macs are common for editors (who use the Adobe suite to make timelines for dailies) and producers (because shiny), while Windows is mainly used by admin staff (accounting, hr, etc) because they use the same terrible accounting software as every other company out there (note: this may be less so now with the move to web based solutions). While most hobby level video software is targeted at windows or Mac, the truly powerful stuff (houdini, maya, nuke, blender) are first class citizens on Linux. Currently one of the few artist programs that aren't available for Linux is the adobe suite which is mostly used by editors (for timelines) and photo editing (for promotional material) and most of that happens on Macs, usually in the editing department. Something to keep in mind is that many VFX shops are kind of specialized and will work on very specific portions of a movie or TV show. For example, the company that owns the final product (Disney, Fox, MGM, etc) will pay company A to shoot the movie, then company A will send the footage for a 30 second scene to company B to rotoscope everything, then it gets sent to company C for VFX elements, then to company D for 3d conversion, then to company E for lighting and finally to company F for audio and final stitching. This is repeated (often with different companies A-F) for each scene since different scenes required different levels of expertise in different areas such as crowd generation, fire simulation, raindrop removal (yes, it's as painful as it sounds), background replacement, CG helicopters, etc. Because of this, the few steps that require windows are typically handled by 1 or 2 companies so the rest only need enough Mac/Windows machines for their local editors to stick timelines together for daily reviews. An interesting side effect of the above is that almost every company you see in the credits of a movie had no idea what the dialog was because audio is one of the last things that gets added and completely bypasses 90% of the VFX houses involved.
- mroche 6y ago
  In addition to the other responses, the VFX community has strong roots coming in the SGI/IRIX days. When those platforms started to decline due to competition from modern commodity hardware among other reasons, Linux offered the best path of migration from both a hardware support perspective and reasonable compatibility with existing pipelines and tools (the latter being very important). Red Hat became a sort of de facto at that point. ^ This is what I have been told by my older colleagues; I wasn’t around for this. My current employer danced around with RHL and Fedora Core before moving to CentOS 6 (now 7, and looking at what to do with 8). Pretty much all studios using Linux in this industry are running RHEL/CentOS, with a very small handful operating on Ubuntu. Home users will do whatever they want and deal with whatever incompatibilities arise ;)

vultour 6y ago

So companies should expect OSS maintainers to provide the same level of service that a RedHat subscription does if they donate?

bityard 6y ago
Who is suggesting that?
- nvr219 6y ago
  I am
  - pabs3 6y ago
    It may not be to the level of support that RedHat provides, but Debian does provide gratis support and there are consultancies providing paid support: https://www.debian.org/support https://www.debian.org/support https://www.debian.org/consultants/ https://www.debian.org/consultants/

tootie 6y ago

I don't see a lot of production workloads running debian unless it's a Ubuntu which is backed by canonical.

curt15 6y ago
Google's production servers run a customised version of Debian https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/presentation/merlin https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/...
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  Also desktops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux
GordonS 6y ago
I know you mean in terms of host OS, but as an aside, loads of Docker images are based on the "slim" Debian images.
eloff 6y ago
I see you've been downvoted, but this statement is true. Ubuntu on both servers and desktop is far more popular than debian. Popular is not always a good proxy for better, but in this case following a well tread path is advantageous when you run into trouble.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Is there anything Ubuntu-specific in Ubuntu these days (other than process stuff, like release cycle)? Or is it just Debian with commercial support and branding?
tomc1985 6y ago
Considering that Ubuntu is a superset of Debian, then yes you do see lots of debian production workloads Personally, I used to support a $25m/yr business on a cluster of Debian servers, which itself supported about 1000 remote field installations, also running Debian. Let me tell you, Debian was the least of my troubles in that job. It really did just work

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

The Linux kernel itself is corporate backed.

emilsedgh 6y ago
There is a difference between corporate backed and being owned and operated by a corporation. Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE are owned by companies. That ownership is more than just trademarks. The own the trademark and are the sole decision makers.

eloff 6y ago

> If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations. How is that as useful to you personally as a support subscription? You can't replace a support contract with wishful thinking and a donation. It's great to support open source projects, but lets not mix concerns here.

TylerE 6y ago

Debian is in fact incorporated. "Software in the Public Interest, Inc. is a tax-exempt non-profit corporation based in the United States of America, founded by Debian people in 1997 to help free software/hardware organisations." It owns the various Debian trademarks, etc.

kodah 6y ago
There is a massive difference between a company that manages trademarks and a for-profit business that depends entirely on gatekeeping behind a subscription and support contract. Before someone brings up Fedora, RHEL exercises ultimate control over that too. Think about that, RHEL owns the trademark to Fedora. Feel free to browse their board too. You can argue that Ubuntu provides a counter model to RHEL where only services and select products require a subscription but the OS is otherwise free.
pabs3 6y ago
There are actually several non-profits holding Debian assets, in years with a physical DebConf usually a new or existing organisation is enlisted to hold funds for that conference. https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Treasurer/Organizations https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Treasurer/Organizations https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/TrustedOrganizationCriteria https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/TrustedOrganizationCriteri...

JeremyNT 6y ago

Debian is amazing, and sadly often overlooked. I was always a little confused by how popular Ubuntu became. Canonical never did much to add value, often replacing more standard tools with strange canonical replacements that didn't survive the test of time. If you use Ubuntu now, give Debian a try. The stability and community are really second to none. For all my personal use I run Arch, but I would not hesitate to run Debian in production instead of a commercial distribution.

krupan 6y ago
When Ubuntu came out, Debian was notoriously difficult to install. The joke was that Ubuntu was the African word for, "can't install Debian."
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian. Before that I was on FreeBSD, and before that I was in Slackware. All were always fine What does “difficult to install” even mean?
  - alrs 6y ago
    fighting with XF86Config, hoping not to fry your monitor.
    - jbverschoor 6y ago
      Well, that was with any dist, and not really a Debian issue. Besides, last time I ran a GUI on linux was probably over 20 years ago.
      - alrs 6y ago
        What complicated it is that usually when you were coming to Debian you were coming from Slackware or a BSD, so everything you knew about init systems and software distribution went out the window. Where's rc.local? Why did ./configure && make && make install destroy my system? Also: we're talking about 20 years ago: everything was harder then.

tempfs 6y ago

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had Debian stable go wrong in any application[server,desktop,laptops or raspian]. I use it everywhere and it is pretty fantastic. Despite Debian being phenomenal in many ways, it doesn't offer up a head for the chopping block to replace yours if things go wrong in a corporate application. Good luck getting IT folks to deploy anything that doesn't offer them an out. Using CentOS knowing that it is downstream from RedHat but that RedHat would step up and fix things in a semi-timely manner was good enough for many enterprises....at least until IBM got involved. Ubuntu is also a weird choice generally speaking because Ubuntu just uses Debian's testing repo as a base and really only significantly varies in the kernels that they roll for various products/services.[cloud,live patching,etc.] They used to maintain their own desktop[Unity] and service management[upstart] and a bunch more variances from Debian...but that ain't really the case today.

pabs3 6y ago
Ubuntu is actually based on Debian unstable, they do their own QA rather than relying on the Debian's testing migration QA.
chaz6 6y ago
Debian was responsible for one of the, if not the, biggest security disasters in Linux distributions' history. A Debian developer thought they knew better than the OpenSSL developers and made a change that compromised every SSH and SSH private key you generated. https://threatpost.com/how-debian-openssl-bug-almost-spawned-disaster-051809/72669/ https://threatpost.com/how-debian-openssl-bug-almost-spawned...
- kodah 6y ago
  I remember this bug. It was what made my interest in systems engineering soar. Unfortunately your characterization of it falls quite short. Here's the mailing list email that inspired the bug: https://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2 I kind of doubt that some guy that thinks he "knows better than the OpenSSL developers" is saying things like this on their mailing list: > What I currently see as best option is to actually comment out those 2 lines of code. But I have no idea what effect this really has on the RNG. The only effect I see is that the pool might receive less entropy. But on the other hand, I'm not even sure how much entropy some unitialised data has. The result was something like 32k sources of entropy which is not enough. Here's the bug Kurt was trying to fix: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=363516 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=363516

krupan 6y ago

Apples and oranges. Corporations that feel they need Enterprise Support, either for the OS itself, or for software that runs on the OS (commercial databases, engineering tools, etc.), pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Or, if they were small just feeling like throwing caution to the wind, they would use Centos (and not tell anyone that it wasn't actually Red Hat). These are businesses and software that used to run only on commercial UNIX operating systems. People tried selling Enterprise Support for Debian back even before Red Hat went commercial, if I remember correctly, but somehow Red Hat timed their effort right and became the defacto replacement for UNIX in these environments.

sjansen 6y ago

From a business perspective, the biggest problem I've experienced with community-based distributions is the limited support cycle. Debian averages about 3 years with LTS, which is really good for for a community distro but really short for a commercial distro. Updating a personal server every 6 months may be easy, but in a mature business it often makes sense to wait 5 years or more before upgrading certain infrastructure so that time and effort can be invested in other areas instead.

derekp7 6y ago
Is that still the case with cloud-first, software-defined infrastructure, and IAAS? Even in non-cloud environments you have pets vs. cattle, with the cattle hopefully out-numbering pets. So your data sits off in a storage device, and gets attached to containers running on an OS that is built from a kickstart or similar install. In that case you can spin up VMs running any OS version, make sure you can deploy your containers on it, test it, and off you go. The days of having a fleet of servers that were carefully hand-crafted and evolved over the years are hopefully coming to a close.

snicker7 6y ago

You might be thinking as a technologist rather than as a business person. Debian is great, but there is no accountability if things go wrong. Accountability and QA may be worth the licensing costs, even if 100% of the software is "free".