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Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically al

Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically all the docs I had. I got a pppd to answer the phone and dialed home from my friends house. I was logged in as root all the time. fvwm was the pinnacle of cool. Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around LA and then someone gives you a car and a map — that was the kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me. potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day, “sarge” still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it’s funny to see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means “futuristic out of touch thing” because I waited for it for so long. Thank you all so much.

TacticalCoder 3y ago
I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by then it was already Debian 1.2! (my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3 and not 1.1 then 1.2) It was hard to get Linux distro for some of us back then: dial-up at best and otherwise we'd buy magazines or books that'd come with a Linux CD. I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever. Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but came back to Debian. Before Debian I was using Slackware. And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on Debian!
antod 3y ago
That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s. Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian. Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then, I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would completely take over, and I would yet again have picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world. A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the years.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by then it was already Debian 1.2! (my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3 and not 1.1 then 1.2) It was hard to get Linux distro for some of us back then: dial-up at best and otherwise we'd buy magazines or books that'd come with a Linux CD. I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever. Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but came back to Debian. Before Debian I was using Slackware. And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on Debian!

antod 3y ago

That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s. Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian. Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then, I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would completely take over, and I would yet again have picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world. A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the years.