5 ms·

What is it about Debian that caused the proliferation of derivatives?

by bhrgunatha 15y ago

brokentone 15y ago
Perhaps it's just because I've never been a big fan of Debian, but I would say its age. It's one of the oldest distros.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Debian, Red Hat, and Slackware all date from ~summer 1994. There's really no age difference between the three.
bryanlarsen 15y ago
3 reasons I can think of: For a long time debian packaging format was seen as superior to the RedHat rpm format. So even though many may have considered RedHat a better distribution as a whole, a Debian base was a better choice for a new distribution. Also, Debian was not dependent on a corporate master, so by basing off of Debian you could be confident that the rug could not be pulled under you by a competitor. The 3rd reason is that a lot of recent distributions are based off of Ubuntu, so they necessarily become Debian based distributions as well. Basing off of Ubuntu gives you the best of both worlds: you get the cadence and corporate backing, but less of the risk -- If Ubuntu starts playing hardball, you can relatively easily transition to a Debian base.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  Just thought of one more. Debian was seen by many to be a great distribution that had a couple of major flaws that could be easily fixed by a corporate master, so there appeared to be an obvious business opportunity. These corporations generally tried to 'fix' three perceived flaws: - simplified the installation process - narrowed the focus - switching away from the perception of Debian being a 'jack of all trades, master of none'. To give an example, the initial release of Ubuntu only supported a couple of thousands of packages on 3 platforms, versus Debian's tens of thousands of packages on 8 platforms. - increased the release cadence
- astine 15y ago
  In addition to Ubuntu, I'd also note Knoppix, which itself was forked from Debian. It was one of the first successful live-CDs and has a lot of forks in its own right.
jm4 15y ago
My guess would be the ease with which one can make a derivative and APT. Red Hat has been a pain in the neck at times. I remember the CentOS people having to jump through some hoops because of some stuff Red Hat was doing. Slackware can be difficult to set up and use without a modern package manager like APT or yum. Anyone extending it and targeting users who don't want to muck around in dependency hell would probably want to bolt on a decent package management system. In that case, it's easier to just start with Debian.
- GoodIntentions 15y ago
  >> Slackware can be difficult to set up and use without a modern package manager like APT slapt-get
- nate_meurer 15y ago
  > "Red Hat has been a pain in the neck at times." Still very much the case. Their ass-backwards networking setup scripts, as just one example.
lftl 15y ago
I would say the key reasons are: 1) They nailed package management early on. Apt doesn't feel revolutionary today, but in the 90s it was WAY better than what Redhat was using as it's package management core. 2) Debian's staunch adherence to their free software guidelines drives forks in two ways. First, you can fork without any worry you're violating a license on some component. Secondly, it encourages people to fork because some people will want to include some of those missing components in out of the box installs, and that simply won't happen with Debian. 3) Ubuntu. If you look at derivatives, about half of them forked off of Ubuntu, so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian.
- ars 15y ago
  > so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian. Ubuntu is not only based on Debian, it still regularly merges in packages from Debian. They should make some kind of distinction between a release that is based off of the parent, but then goes its own way, vs a release that IS the parent + additions. The relationship is much closer. And actually it goes the other way too - debian tries to merge changes from ubunto back into it. (They have a tool that automatically compares them and suggests merges.)
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Debian Policy. It makes for an exceptionally predictable system. A bunch of other bits and pieces which derive from this, open BTS among them. And APT (with policy) still blows RPM out of the water. Lack of policy is a big part. I'd like to play with Mandriva, which uses APT tools but the RPM format just for comparison, but the fact that I can pull apart archives using ar, tar, and gzip, as opposed to relying on an inconstant binary format, has proven invaluable more than once.
flomo 15y ago
This might be a little cynical, but Debian was originally intended to be the Master Distribution that would function as a sort of open source gatekeeper for the Linux world. However, it ended up shipping late and RedHat derivatives got a foothold. If it wasn't for Ubuntu, it would have never fulfilled it's original intention at all. Also, since I'm commenting here, that chart shows a whole lot of completely dead distributions continuing onto the right. It would be a lot more interesting to see how long these forks actually lasted.

What is it about Debian that caused the proliferation of derivatives?

brokentone 15y ago

Perhaps it's just because I've never been a big fan of Debian, but I would say its age. It's one of the oldest distros.

dredmorbius 15y ago
Debian, Red Hat, and Slackware all date from ~summer 1994. There's really no age difference between the three.

bryanlarsen 15y ago

3 reasons I can think of: For a long time debian packaging format was seen as superior to the RedHat rpm format. So even though many may have considered RedHat a better distribution as a whole, a Debian base was a better choice for a new distribution. Also, Debian was not dependent on a corporate master, so by basing off of Debian you could be confident that the rug could not be pulled under you by a competitor. The 3rd reason is that a lot of recent distributions are based off of Ubuntu, so they necessarily become Debian based distributions as well. Basing off of Ubuntu gives you the best of both worlds: you get the cadence and corporate backing, but less of the risk -- If Ubuntu starts playing hardball, you can relatively easily transition to a Debian base.

bryanlarsen 15y ago
Just thought of one more. Debian was seen by many to be a great distribution that had a couple of major flaws that could be easily fixed by a corporate master, so there appeared to be an obvious business opportunity. These corporations generally tried to 'fix' three perceived flaws: - simplified the installation process - narrowed the focus - switching away from the perception of Debian being a 'jack of all trades, master of none'. To give an example, the initial release of Ubuntu only supported a couple of thousands of packages on 3 platforms, versus Debian's tens of thousands of packages on 8 platforms. - increased the release cadence
astine 15y ago
In addition to Ubuntu, I'd also note Knoppix, which itself was forked from Debian. It was one of the first successful live-CDs and has a lot of forks in its own right.

jm4 15y ago

My guess would be the ease with which one can make a derivative and APT. Red Hat has been a pain in the neck at times. I remember the CentOS people having to jump through some hoops because of some stuff Red Hat was doing. Slackware can be difficult to set up and use without a modern package manager like APT or yum. Anyone extending it and targeting users who don't want to muck around in dependency hell would probably want to bolt on a decent package management system. In that case, it's easier to just start with Debian.

GoodIntentions 15y ago
>> Slackware can be difficult to set up and use without a modern package manager like APT slapt-get
nate_meurer 15y ago
> "Red Hat has been a pain in the neck at times." Still very much the case. Their ass-backwards networking setup scripts, as just one example.

lftl 15y ago

I would say the key reasons are: 1) They nailed package management early on. Apt doesn't feel revolutionary today, but in the 90s it was WAY better than what Redhat was using as it's package management core. 2) Debian's staunch adherence to their free software guidelines drives forks in two ways. First, you can fork without any worry you're violating a license on some component. Secondly, it encourages people to fork because some people will want to include some of those missing components in out of the box installs, and that simply won't happen with Debian. 3) Ubuntu. If you look at derivatives, about half of them forked off of Ubuntu, so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian.

ars 15y ago
> so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian. Ubuntu is not only based on Debian, it still regularly merges in packages from Debian. They should make some kind of distinction between a release that is based off of the parent, but then goes its own way, vs a release that IS the parent + additions. The relationship is much closer. And actually it goes the other way too - debian tries to merge changes from ubunto back into it. (They have a tool that automatically compares them and suggests merges.)
dredmorbius 15y ago
Debian Policy. It makes for an exceptionally predictable system. A bunch of other bits and pieces which derive from this, open BTS among them. And APT (with policy) still blows RPM out of the water. Lack of policy is a big part. I'd like to play with Mandriva, which uses APT tools but the RPM format just for comparison, but the fact that I can pull apart archives using ar, tar, and gzip, as opposed to relying on an inconstant binary format, has proven invaluable more than once.

flomo 15y ago

This might be a little cynical, but Debian was originally intended to be the Master Distribution that would function as a sort of open source gatekeeper for the Linux world. However, it ended up shipping late and RedHat derivatives got a foothold. If it wasn't for Ubuntu, it would have never fulfilled it's original intention at all. Also, since I'm commenting here, that chart shows a whole lot of completely dead distributions continuing onto the right. It would be a lot more interesting to see how long these forks actually lasted.