6 ms·

Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers

73 points by mariuz 15y ago

lysol 15y ago
As it should be. Basically everything that Ubuntu brought to the table is now in Debian, except for all the crap.
- driax 15y ago
  They say that Debian servers come from new servers, and many subsequentially change to Ubuntu. From the graph it's clear that CentOS and Debian is mostly steady, Ubuntu is on the rise and everything else is on the way down (in percentages of course).
- freehunter 15y ago
  I'm curious because I don't follow server distro updates often: what server-side stuff did Ubuntu improve on? I was under the impression that most of their gains were on new user experience as opposed to traditional administration.
  - ignoreme 15y ago
    This may seem like a stupid little thing, but I particularly love what they have done with GNU Screen, which is now called Byobu on Ubuntu. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Byobu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Byobu
  - lhnn 15y ago
    They have created Screen, and they have a lot of Cloud tools they've created based on Openstack. They also have some better default service configurations. [citation needed].
    - tmhedberg 15y ago
      Canonical did not create screen; it is a GNU project that existed before Ubuntu ever did. They did, however, develop an extended, improved version of it (byobu).
      - dspillett 15y ago
        It isn't really a "version" of screen. It is a bunch of scripts and wrappers using/around hooks that screen had built in (but hardly anyone ever knew existed). It is a rather nice little set of basic improvements though.
buster 15y ago
It should be noted that technology wise you could add CentOS and RHEL. I'm pleased to see Debian #1 though, i hope it stays that way! :)
- BCM43 15y ago
  You could also add debian and ubuntu, but I guess the connection is not quite as strong.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Ubuntu has the juju stuff on its side. I'm not sure how well it works with Debian.
  - buster 15y ago
    No, you could not. Afaik Ubuntu releases don't correlate that much with Debian releases. CentOS on the other hand is always binary compatible and basically just a re-branding of RHEL without the commercial support. So, apart from the commercial side CentOS and RHEL are pretty much exactly the same. I don't beliebe this is true for Debian and Ubuntu. As far as i know, it's like that: Fedora is the bleeding-edge Desktop RedHat version that gets the latest stuff. At some time it's forked, fixed and baked into a RHEL release. When this is released it's taken by the community, recompiled/branded (with the exact same sources) and released as CentOS.
emehrkay 15y ago
As a non-hardcore linux guy, I find Debian a lot easier to maintain than CentOS
- bwarp 15y ago
  It definitely is. The upgrade path between major versions is significantly easier which is where it really hurts. Also, despite the Debian packages being a little older, they always just work and have sensible patches and defaults applied.
  - giulivo 15y ago
    actually the major versions upgrade problem is fixed in Fedora, there are some "yum upgrade faq" which document how to do it: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum but I'd still prefer a rolling release like Archlinux does
pdx 15y ago
I started with Debian because I perceived it to be the safest. As I became more comfortable with Linux, I became frustrated with the versions available to me through apt-get of software that I wanted, and I rapidly became tired of compiling everything I wanted from source in order to get a more recent version. I finally took the chance on Ubuntu for that reason, and haven't looked back. I suspect my story is a common one.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I just aptitude upgrade'd to Sid/Unstable.
- bwarp 15y ago
  I'm not sure it is. Speaking only from personal experience, we've canned all our Ubuntu LTS machines as they were terribly unreliable (kernel failures and wierd bugs on good hardware) and shipped broken packages regularly (mysql-server being the most notorious). No problems at all with Debian so far.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Though I made the switch too, I don't get your problem with packages. Debian uses Aptitude same as Ubuntu. It sounds like the problem you had with Debian was that you didn't have the sources you needed in your sources list. I started with CentOS but found it difficult to maintain and set up. Then I switched to Debian because for some reason I felt pressure to not use Ubuntu. People often imply that Ubuntu is for bad programmers, inexperienced people, etc. It's kind of like "well, all the cool kids are using distro X because we're l33t and you're not cool because you use Ubuntu" so I stayed away from it for a while. Finally I ended up deciding that it was more important to just get a fucking app running on a server I could most effectively use. I'd been using Xubuntu and Crunchbang on my laptop for a while and so I made the switch and I'm very happy with it. I subsequently redeployed all my VPSes with Ubuntu 11.10 or 10.10 depending on what the hosts offered. I like it because not only is it the easiest for me to manage but it seems like its easier to find help for any problems you may run into and good documentation. I say screw the hipster crowd who are too cool for Ubuntu and just focus on what's best for you. I think people like that are trying to convince themselves of how great they are more than anything else.
rilindo 15y ago
Expect this to be brief. For a while, there was uncertainty because CentOS updates were way behind Red Hat (the upstream vendor). As of January, CentOS is effectively in sync with RHEL.
strictfp 15y ago
Can anyone point to some strong points for CentOS over Debian? I was surprised that CentOS has been in lead, always preferred Debian myself.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  I'm not sure there are many completely objective reasons to choose one or the other. Things like release-cycle style and package layout come to mind. CentOS also has a different toolchain for some system management tasks like run-level management. Keep in mind that for everything you like about Debian, there maybe someone else who dislikes it. For example, some sysadmins would rather the Apache 2 package not create folders like sites-enabled/sites-disabled along with the associated tools. It comes down to a matter of preference.
  - quicksilver03 15y ago
    Quite right, I seriously dislike the scattered approach to configuration files of Debian packages and thus I stay clear of Debian and any derivative like Ubuntu. However the end result is the same, a properly configured a Debian box works just as well as a properly configured CentOS or Arch box.
    - uggedal 15y ago
      The scattered approach to configuration files is great when you automate your configuration with tools like Puppet or Chef.
- prolepunk 15y ago
  Some packages are more stable or up to date on CentOS than on debian, java, virtd and xen comes to mind. When I used the packages on Debian I needed to do some tweaking whereas on CentOS these things worked out of the box. I got this idea that in general Debian is easier to manage but for all the 'Enterprizy' stuff CentOS has the edge.
realschool 15y ago
Although CentOS and Fedora both come from Red Hat, so maybe Red Hat is the most popular?
JoelMcCracken 15y ago
I was thinking "Hasn't it always been?", and then remembered Redhat. Debian shows that actually solving real problems well is a valid way to approach open source software over the long term. I first got into Linux years ago, before Ubuntu really existed. At the time, Debian was really awesome. It solved the biggest problem at the time: installing, updating, and removing software on *nix systems. By contrast, Redhat had rpms, but they sucked. I still, to this day, have a difficult time figuring out how to do /anything/ with packages on anything derived from redhat. What is up2date? what is yum? where does the rpm command it? why aren't all of these documented well? I think ultimately the rise of Debian illustrates the conflict of interests that comes from certifications. Making your software easier to use makes certifications less valuable, after all.
- asomiv 15y ago
  I haven't used RedHat-based distros for years now but I remember that back when I switched to Debian-based distros I was equally confused about Debian's package management system. I didn't think, and still don't think, that dpkg and apt are documented that well. To answer your question: yum is to rpm as apt is to dpkg. But I've always found it weird that there's a difference between apt-get and apt-cache; in contrast, "yum install" and "yum search" use the same executable. The documentation concerning building Debian packages is often out of date and scattered all over the Internet with no clear central place. And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt.
  - sirn 15y ago
    >And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt. Aptitude is a APT frontend that solves exactly the problem you mentioned; no more `apt-cache search` nor `apt-file`, it's all just `aptitude`. Plus a little bit of dependencies tracking (which I think apt has it available for a while already). aptitude is exactly what apt should be, IMHO.
- jcurbo 15y ago
  Basically my experience with Debian long ago as well. I have always thought the Debian packaging system was far superior to rpm and was glad to see Ubuntu take the Debian experience and bring it to the masses (although I still prefer straight up Debian for myself)
redsymbol 15y ago
Our web servers run Debian for the most part. The only real hassle has been with PCI-DSS compliance. For example, Debian Squeeze has Apache v. 2.2.16 (or did until recently), which our compliance scanning vendor flagged as having several unacceptable security holes. The solution that's worked well is to just selectively upgrade the handful of offending packages: either from testing, or some other source, or in rarer cases, compiling from source. Annoying and time-consuming, but soluble, and IMO worth the tradeoff given Debian's other good qualities right now.
- kev009 15y ago
  Your scanning vendor should know better and advise you properly. Just kidding, the "security" industry sucks. Debian and other long term enterprise distributions backport fixes for these unacceptable security holes. A better solution is to simply turn off the minor version string as that's the extent of their testing. I'd guess a good number of people intuitively do what you did. The problem is, instead of getting sucked in by a scheduled apt-get update, now you probably wont notice critical fixes until the next quarterly scan is due.
- jcurbo 15y ago
  You could see if updated versions are in the Debian backports collection. You can pick and choose your updates via apt pinning.

73 points by mariuz 15y ago

lysol 15y ago

As it should be. Basically everything that Ubuntu brought to the table is now in Debian, except for all the crap.

driax 15y ago
They say that Debian servers come from new servers, and many subsequentially change to Ubuntu. From the graph it's clear that CentOS and Debian is mostly steady, Ubuntu is on the rise and everything else is on the way down (in percentages of course).
freehunter 15y ago
I'm curious because I don't follow server distro updates often: what server-side stuff did Ubuntu improve on? I was under the impression that most of their gains were on new user experience as opposed to traditional administration.
- ignoreme 15y ago
  This may seem like a stupid little thing, but I particularly love what they have done with GNU Screen, which is now called Byobu on Ubuntu. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Byobu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Byobu
- lhnn 15y ago
  They have created Screen, and they have a lot of Cloud tools they've created based on Openstack. They also have some better default service configurations. [citation needed].
  - tmhedberg 15y ago
    Canonical did not create screen; it is a GNU project that existed before Ubuntu ever did. They did, however, develop an extended, improved version of it (byobu).
    - dspillett 15y ago
      It isn't really a "version" of screen. It is a bunch of scripts and wrappers using/around hooks that screen had built in (but hardly anyone ever knew existed). It is a rather nice little set of basic improvements though.

buster 15y ago

It should be noted that technology wise you could add CentOS and RHEL. I'm pleased to see Debian #1 though, i hope it stays that way! :)

BCM43 15y ago
You could also add debian and ubuntu, but I guess the connection is not quite as strong.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Ubuntu has the juju stuff on its side. I'm not sure how well it works with Debian.
- buster 15y ago
  No, you could not. Afaik Ubuntu releases don't correlate that much with Debian releases. CentOS on the other hand is always binary compatible and basically just a re-branding of RHEL without the commercial support. So, apart from the commercial side CentOS and RHEL are pretty much exactly the same. I don't beliebe this is true for Debian and Ubuntu. As far as i know, it's like that: Fedora is the bleeding-edge Desktop RedHat version that gets the latest stuff. At some time it's forked, fixed and baked into a RHEL release. When this is released it's taken by the community, recompiled/branded (with the exact same sources) and released as CentOS.

emehrkay 15y ago

As a non-hardcore linux guy, I find Debian a lot easier to maintain than CentOS

bwarp 15y ago
It definitely is. The upgrade path between major versions is significantly easier which is where it really hurts. Also, despite the Debian packages being a little older, they always just work and have sensible patches and defaults applied.
- giulivo 15y ago
  actually the major versions upgrade problem is fixed in Fedora, there are some "yum upgrade faq" which document how to do it: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum but I'd still prefer a rolling release like Archlinux does

pdx 15y ago

I started with Debian because I perceived it to be the safest. As I became more comfortable with Linux, I became frustrated with the versions available to me through apt-get of software that I wanted, and I rapidly became tired of compiling everything I wanted from source in order to get a more recent version. I finally took the chance on Ubuntu for that reason, and haven't looked back. I suspect my story is a common one.

icebraining 15y ago
I just aptitude upgrade'd to Sid/Unstable.
bwarp 15y ago
I'm not sure it is. Speaking only from personal experience, we've canned all our Ubuntu LTS machines as they were terribly unreliable (kernel failures and wierd bugs on good hardware) and shipped broken packages regularly (mysql-server being the most notorious). No problems at all with Debian so far.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Though I made the switch too, I don't get your problem with packages. Debian uses Aptitude same as Ubuntu. It sounds like the problem you had with Debian was that you didn't have the sources you needed in your sources list. I started with CentOS but found it difficult to maintain and set up. Then I switched to Debian because for some reason I felt pressure to not use Ubuntu. People often imply that Ubuntu is for bad programmers, inexperienced people, etc. It's kind of like "well, all the cool kids are using distro X because we're l33t and you're not cool because you use Ubuntu" so I stayed away from it for a while. Finally I ended up deciding that it was more important to just get a fucking app running on a server I could most effectively use. I'd been using Xubuntu and Crunchbang on my laptop for a while and so I made the switch and I'm very happy with it. I subsequently redeployed all my VPSes with Ubuntu 11.10 or 10.10 depending on what the hosts offered. I like it because not only is it the easiest for me to manage but it seems like its easier to find help for any problems you may run into and good documentation. I say screw the hipster crowd who are too cool for Ubuntu and just focus on what's best for you. I think people like that are trying to convince themselves of how great they are more than anything else.

rilindo 15y ago

Expect this to be brief. For a while, there was uncertainty because CentOS updates were way behind Red Hat (the upstream vendor). As of January, CentOS is effectively in sync with RHEL.

strictfp 15y ago

Can anyone point to some strong points for CentOS over Debian? I was surprised that CentOS has been in lead, always preferred Debian myself.

bradleyland 15y ago
I'm not sure there are many completely objective reasons to choose one or the other. Things like release-cycle style and package layout come to mind. CentOS also has a different toolchain for some system management tasks like run-level management. Keep in mind that for everything you like about Debian, there maybe someone else who dislikes it. For example, some sysadmins would rather the Apache 2 package not create folders like sites-enabled/sites-disabled along with the associated tools. It comes down to a matter of preference.
- quicksilver03 15y ago
  Quite right, I seriously dislike the scattered approach to configuration files of Debian packages and thus I stay clear of Debian and any derivative like Ubuntu. However the end result is the same, a properly configured a Debian box works just as well as a properly configured CentOS or Arch box.
  - uggedal 15y ago
    The scattered approach to configuration files is great when you automate your configuration with tools like Puppet or Chef.
prolepunk 15y ago
Some packages are more stable or up to date on CentOS than on debian, java, virtd and xen comes to mind. When I used the packages on Debian I needed to do some tweaking whereas on CentOS these things worked out of the box. I got this idea that in general Debian is easier to manage but for all the 'Enterprizy' stuff CentOS has the edge.

realschool 15y ago

Although CentOS and Fedora both come from Red Hat, so maybe Red Hat is the most popular?

JoelMcCracken 15y ago

I was thinking "Hasn't it always been?", and then remembered Redhat. Debian shows that actually solving real problems well is a valid way to approach open source software over the long term. I first got into Linux years ago, before Ubuntu really existed. At the time, Debian was really awesome. It solved the biggest problem at the time: installing, updating, and removing software on *nix systems. By contrast, Redhat had rpms, but they sucked. I still, to this day, have a difficult time figuring out how to do /anything/ with packages on anything derived from redhat. What is up2date? what is yum? where does the rpm command it? why aren't all of these documented well? I think ultimately the rise of Debian illustrates the conflict of interests that comes from certifications. Making your software easier to use makes certifications less valuable, after all.

asomiv 15y ago
I haven't used RedHat-based distros for years now but I remember that back when I switched to Debian-based distros I was equally confused about Debian's package management system. I didn't think, and still don't think, that dpkg and apt are documented that well. To answer your question: yum is to rpm as apt is to dpkg. But I've always found it weird that there's a difference between apt-get and apt-cache; in contrast, "yum install" and "yum search" use the same executable. The documentation concerning building Debian packages is often out of date and scattered all over the Internet with no clear central place. And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt.
- sirn 15y ago
  >And finally there's this "aptitude" thing; I still don't understand why it exists and how it's different from regular apt. Aptitude is a APT frontend that solves exactly the problem you mentioned; no more `apt-cache search` nor `apt-file`, it's all just `aptitude`. Plus a little bit of dependencies tracking (which I think apt has it available for a while already). aptitude is exactly what apt should be, IMHO.
jcurbo 15y ago
Basically my experience with Debian long ago as well. I have always thought the Debian packaging system was far superior to rpm and was glad to see Ubuntu take the Debian experience and bring it to the masses (although I still prefer straight up Debian for myself)

redsymbol 15y ago

Our web servers run Debian for the most part. The only real hassle has been with PCI-DSS compliance. For example, Debian Squeeze has Apache v. 2.2.16 (or did until recently), which our compliance scanning vendor flagged as having several unacceptable security holes. The solution that's worked well is to just selectively upgrade the handful of offending packages: either from testing, or some other source, or in rarer cases, compiling from source. Annoying and time-consuming, but soluble, and IMO worth the tradeoff given Debian's other good qualities right now.

kev009 15y ago
Your scanning vendor should know better and advise you properly. Just kidding, the "security" industry sucks. Debian and other long term enterprise distributions backport fixes for these unacceptable security holes. A better solution is to simply turn off the minor version string as that's the extent of their testing. I'd guess a good number of people intuitively do what you did. The problem is, instead of getting sucked in by a scheduled apt-get update, now you probably wont notice critical fixes until the next quarterly scan is due.
jcurbo 15y ago
You could see if updated versions are in the Debian backports collection. You can pick and choose your updates via apt pinning.