9 ms·

Debian is at the heart of the most successful Linux distros

257 points by pabs3 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago
I wonder if it was influenced by the fact that apt-get was much more mature than yum/whatever, at the beginning of mass broadband age. Before that, RedHat and RPM almost got rid of Debian.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  More mature in what way exactly? In the fact that it's faster? Because I wouldn't call starting services by default, or replacing conflicting services very mature. Maturity I would associate with stability and predictability. And regarding the speed, which is what most people mention online when they compare the two, it's only faster because apt-get update is a separate step.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    That does not sound like package system issue. Around 2003, Yum was a Python tool which took ages just to build dependency graph to do basic things.
    - INTPenis 3y ago
      Yes it was Python for a long time actually. And yet it still had very useful features like rollback and history. Things large government contracts kinda required.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        They don't require it at the OS level though, contracts like that require it on the state of the system as a whole and the typical way to deal with this is by using versioned backups and audit trails.
      - curt15 3y ago
        >And yet it still had very useful features like rollback and history. yum/dnf rollback is unreliable even today because the previously installed versions of packages might no longer be present in the repos.
        dralley 3y ago
        Old versions are cached on your system for a few days, and most distros do keep a few old versions around just in case.
        BossingAround 3y ago
        I use Fedora as my daily driver for work and DNF rollback might as well not exist. It's atrocious. Even when turning on the local repo cache function (which keeps RPM packages on your system for some time in case you want to roll back), I have never been able to successfully roll back an upgrade that contained more than ~10-20 packages. I love Fedora, but DNF has atrocious UX.
        INTPenis 3y ago
        That's mostly true for Fedora, because it's a fast rolling release they don't keep old packages around. It's not true for RHEL who strive to maintain backwards compatibility and stability.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    I doubt "apt-get" was more advanced, but the breadth and quality of Debian's packages were unparalleled. Debian "stable" always just worked, and if you preferred newer packages, Testing and Unstable were usually a good compromise between stability and shiny. I haven't run Linux on my local machines for a couple years though, so maybe things have changed a bit, but if we're talking about the years where Debian gained "market" (mind?) share, then these are the reasons IMHO.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    From memory when I moved to Debian about 2000, apt just worked, and redhat 5.2/6.0) had nothing to compare. It’s the main reason I changed. Wikipedia says yum wasn’t even a thing until 2002.
    - mekster 3y ago
      I think it even came from another distro called YellowDog Linux or something, hence the command name.
      - petepete 3y ago
        That's correct. YellowDog was based on Red Hat Linux but built for PowerPC computers.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  I think it was more that Ubuntu was easier to use on the desktop, so developers would use that locally or in VMs and RedHat/CentOS on the server. But inevitably, they would also then push to deploy on Ubuntu servers to reduce friction. This was true for me, I hated dealing with CentOS because of the minor incompatibilities with Ubuntu, so whenever I had the chance, I pushed/chose Ubuntu on the servers. So little by little, you hook a generation on Ubuntu. It's a bit like the old Photoshop strategy, you let them pirate the software when young to hook them up, and then they would demand it professionally.
  - mekster 3y ago
    Never seriously used Linux desktop but before several versions of RH, packages were so much older than Ubuntu, it was pretty impractical to use CentOS but people who don't know a thing about servers always chose CentOS because when they Google around, newbie blogs tend to use CentOS for no reason other than RedHat probably was more recognized as a vendor name. Ubuntu was always easier on the server with root user disabled by default and unattended-upgrades did its job without a hassle with newer packages. (It meant quite different if it was PHP 5 or 7.)
    - gilcot 3y ago
      Here, in France, established companies like dealing with big established providers and feel happy with licence contracts. Plus, a version last at least five years. (to compete Ubuntu had to come with four years LTS...) So when they have to use a GNU/Linux distribution, they tend to choose RHEL (Novell could have been a good choice but I don't know why they're not known or not well.) Many countries in Europe and in French speaking Africa countries also love RHEL. Consequence: when you couldn't sign/subscribe for RHEL, you pick CentOS.
- devjab 3y ago
  I think that it's because it's boring which in terms of economics translates directly into savings and safety. Look at RedHat, it has some really nice tools and frankly always had, but if you made it the backbone of your platforms engineering team for the previous 30 years. Well, then I think you would've have needed to "reschool/retrain" your engineers 3 or 4 times as the tool chain has changed drastically. Which is obviously not as dramatic as it may sound, but compare it to Debian where things operate pretty much how they always have. For some organizations there is benefit to continuously improving their platform engineering, but for many, technology is a tool that's required to do something else. They don't want to keep up with changes, and sometimes the changes aren't useful for them. On HackerNews most of the content and users are technology focused, but in the real world its the opposite. There is a reason why many enterprise organizations still run stuff on mainframes as an example. It's not because they want to, many have even spend hundreds of millions trying to exit, but the thing that's the most important is the stability to their core business. Now I don't want you to get the impression that I'm drawing a comparison between Debian and mainframes, my point is simply that to many organizations the ability to provide a stable support the core purpose of the organization is more important than anything else. Debian does that.
- roenxi 3y ago
  It might be Debian's slow release cycle. The people who comment & review love new things, because they can comment on them and review. But that creates a massive bias against the silent majority who dislike upgrades and don't want to think about the OS. Compare Debian to Fedora. Fedora there are multiple releases per year. Debian you have the protection of being in the herd for a good 2 years. Each release is a much more known quality and it is easier to find bugs and documentation for whatever it is that got broken in Bookworm. Investing in workarounds makes more sense because it won't be fixed in 6 months. Etc. Only software project I know where it seems likely that moving slow is a positive. But slow seems to work well for Debian. As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. EDIT Also, woah! Anticipating something like this sort of manoeuvre is a good reason to have avoided RHEL. Corporations. Not long term bastions of freedom. "However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public. The code is still available to Red Hat customers, as well as developers using free accounts, though under conditions that forbid redistribution of the source code." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Amen. An OS should get out of the way of the real work as much as possible. Any time spent on the OS itself by and end user is essentially time wasted that can never be recovered by writing or using a better application. An OS is essentially a delivery mechanism, not a goal in its own right.
  - BossingAround 3y ago
    > As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. As a Fedora user, I like that someone pays for Fedora development, which (hopefully?) enforces standards in terms of code quality and QA, but also things like workplace policies etc. (e.g. I couldn't use software whose staff has been alleging sexual assault). I think the only non-corporate distro I'd use is Arch (which I did for a while, but Fedora is just so easy to use!) I should give Debian a try though for sure.
- michaelt 3y ago
  In the early 2000s, several things happened at around the same time. * Red Hat Linux (previously the go-to desktop linux) was discontinued in favour of RHEL/Fedora in ~2003. * Ubuntu was first released in 2004. * Around 2000 a new release would come as a CD image and the normal way of upgrading was to wipe out everything except your home directory. This meant trying out a new distro was pretty much as easy as upgrading your existing one. * As you say, although Yum was released in 2002, apt-get had been around since 1998, and so at that time was more mature. * Wifi became increasingly common, and almost always needed proprietary binary blobs. Proprietary ATI and nvidia linux drivers became available. And of course MP3 was widespread. Ubuntu arrived at an opportune moment - former Red Hat users looking for a new home, users used to wiping their system and installing a new distro, and clear benefits if wifi, graphics and MP3 all work out the box.
  - reidrac 3y ago
    In my circles, and for a long time, "Ubuntu" meant "I can't install Debian". Because Debian used a text based install that required a bit more knowledge (and reading), and Ubuntu was more user friendly at the time.
    - varjag 3y ago
      Such a weird flex. Debian sure wasn't Slackware, it was one of the easiest distros to install and manage. It took years until commercial distros like RedHat could catch up.
      - stephenr 3y ago
        The point of the quote isn't that Debian is hard. It's that people chose a worse distro because they need hand holding. Consider a comparable quote: > Taskrabbit is an ancient Swedish word meaning "I can't assemble IKEA furniture".
      - brnt 3y ago
        The Debian install wizard is quite long and technical. I can see how Ubuntu (no more than a handful of questions) appeals.
- oh_nice_marmot 3y ago
  Definitely. From the time I started to mess around with Linux, around 96-98, the biggest distros were certainly Slackware, Debian and Red Hat. Slack you basically had to compile and config everything from scratch. RH helped a bit with packaged software in RPM format but dependency management was missing. Basically a glorified tar ball. apt solved the distribution and packaging of software.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I started my Linux journey (having being a user on SunOS previously) on a IBM ThinkPad 755CX with a Pentium-S. Installed Slackware from floppies, took literally days to compile a kernel or large program. Eventually I was using `slapt-get`, found that Ubuntu could have KDE installed, thought I'd had enough of config, make, make install (or `checkinstall -S`) and installed Ubuntu+KDE (and later Kubuntu). I still prefer .deb packages so now I'm looking at jumping ship, probably to MX Linux as Ubuntu is using more and more snaps and so far they've just caused me problems; I also have philosophical objections (not necessarily well-founded in logic!) against monolithic packages. Not sure why I started that reply, ... get off my lawn!
    - nraf 3y ago
      My apologies, I assumed your lawn was Open Course.
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        Lol, it is, help yourself to an apple from the tree too (the birds seem to have had them all though).
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    don't forget that in 96-98 we had S.u.S.E as the fourth biggest distro. And I remember that YaST managed dependencies with RPM in a user friendly way. Back in 1998-99 was my favourite distro because of that.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  On the early days, if you get a RedHat CD-ROM, you wouldn't be able to install half of the packages there because they would conflict with the other half. And any update would change the conflicts, to the point in that updating it simply wasn't a thing. But technically, rpm was way more complete then dpkg. This changed with apt-get, as it took many years to the RPM distros to create yum.
jgb1984 3y ago
I've been using Debian as my daily driver on desktops, laptops and servers since Debian Potato (around the year 2000). My desktops often last over 10 years on a single install, upgrading from one release to the next, without a hitch. Debian is the best! For me it's the highest quality operating system with a super impressive governance organization behind it. Cheers to another 30 more years!
- Noughmad 3y ago
  > over 10 years on a single install, upgrading from one release to the next\ I mean, that's about one release upgrade
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    Debian 6 was released in July, 2014. It is now August 2023 and stable is Debian 12. So that would be 6 stable releases in nine years.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Your New Year’s resolution doesn’t involve a fresh install? What? Only semi-joking. Wish I could but the constantly declining quality of Microsoft software has made it an absolute.
padjo 3y ago
The distro certainly has more longevity than the relationship that inspired its name.
- butterNaN 3y ago
  Context: "Debian was founded by Ian. First announced on August 16, 1993, by Ian Murdock, who initially called the system "the Debian Linux Release". The word "Debian" was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend (later ex-wife) Debra Lynn and his own first name. (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian)
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Didn't the distro founder uh. Remove themselves from this mortal coil a few years back?
  - jwilk 3y ago
    Yes: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/07/ian_murdock_autopsy/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/07/ian_murdock_autopsy/
    - greggsy 3y ago
      What an incredibly disrespectful article. The details surrounding his death, and the nature of the event, and not at all in the public’s interest, and likely serve to cause more anguish to the family and friends. Even the title is written inappropriately. In Australia at least, the journalistic standard [1] states that reports should avoid sensationalising suicide, and should not report on the methods. It’s also expected for support details to be added at the end of the story (this addendum is often the only indication that the persons’ death was the result of suicide). https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SPECIFIC_STANDARDS_SUICIDE_-_July_2014.pdf https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S...
    - mike_hock 3y ago
      .
xvilka 3y ago
The problem with Debian is their insistence on "stability" by not updating the packages. In the modern world, when software development speed picked up steam quite a lot, releases of new software happen much more often than distribution life cycles.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  That's not a problem, that's a feature. If you're on Debian or Ubuntu LTS, you (generally) don't have to worry about something breaking by running `apt upgrade` to keep up with security fixes - only release upgrades can and will give you trouble, but eh, that's to be expected.
  - znpy 3y ago
    Yes in theory, mot really in practice. Many times I’ve add to add external/weird repositories to get some functionalities i rrallneeded (eg: appropriate codecs fir bluetooth audio and a version of bluez that supported by bluetooth headsets) and that kind of tainting really endangers the longevity of a debian-based system. I understand that the fault is completely on the external repositories and on the user… however the choice then is to be able to use my hardware (or, in general, to the kind if computing i need) or not. These days I’m using fedora btw, which has been really stable while providing fairly up-to-date packages.
    - fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
      I think if you're finding debian too slow you're probably not valuing stability to the same level. That's not a problem with debian, that's just a mismatch in needs, you're probably better off with a "less" stable operating system.
      - znpy 3y ago
        > That's not a problem with debian, that's just a mismatch in needs, you're probably better off with a "less" stable operating system. I'll be honest, i haven't had any stability issues with Fedora either, and i've been upgrading as often as i would with Debian. And in both cases, i'm using fairly old and known hardware (years old thinkpads, the T440 and the X270).
susam 3y ago
I have been using Debian GNU/Linux since 2006. Debian 3.1 Sarge was the first version I used. The primary reason for choosing Debian back then was the large number of packages it had in its package repositories. Its exceptional stability came as a bonus. Over these 17 years, I have used Debian for frontend servers, backend servers, desktop computers, personal laptops, personal virtual machines, team virtual machines, etc. I run my static HTML websites, Common Lisp web applications, ZNC IRC network bouncer, Exim4 MTA, Matrix-IRC bridging clients, etc. all on Debian. I also spin up fresh new Debian VMs to serve as clean rooms for testing my open source projects and technical guides. For example, when I published my "Lisp in Vim" article, Debian turned out to be a nice system to quickly install all the necessary packages and test out all the steps in my article thoroughly. When I write a shell script to be used across a variety of shells, I run my test suite for the script on bash, ksh, zsh, dash, posh, and yash, all of which can be easily installed on Debian. Debian has served me very well for a wide variety of activities ranging from things like software development and testing to personal digital chores like writing documents, presentations, splitting and merging PDFs, editing audio/video files, document format conversions, editing photographs, etc. and even having fun, say by raytracing with POV-Ray, running vintage DOS games on DOSBox, or recording live music from my digital piano. No matter what the nature of the problem is, the solution often begins with a simple "apt-get install" command. In all these years, I have never ever faced any problem with dependency management or package installation in the stable branch. Yes, the packages can sometimes begin to get old by a few years but the whole system remains outstandingly stable. It is a great distribution for long running servers. Debian is also quite good for a lean personal computing environment. In my opinion, the Debian stable version sets the gold standard for stability in the world of Linux distributions.
- rycomb 3y ago
  My favorites are Debian for servers, Arch for desktops. Debian in desktops didn't really work for me... a rolling release makes more sense.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    Debian unstable and testing are rolling releases.
MrStonedOne 3y ago
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Chiba-City 3y ago
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caboteria 3y ago
I've recently noticed a new market which Debian is dominating: "official" Docker container images. If you "docker run golang" or "docker run ruby" or "docker run python" (or many of the images tagged as docker official images) then you're running Debian.
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  Either that, or Alpine (if musl is acceptable).
  - paradox460 3y ago
    The tcp and dns quirks of musl generally make it unacceptable for many things, sadly
    - makeworld 3y ago
      musl now supports dns over tcp.
louwrentius 3y ago
I've had several issues with Ubuntu on servers and Raspberry Pis, so recently I've decided to switch (back) to Debian. In particular, Ubuntu snapd decided to fill my /tmp folder with gigabytes of data for no apparent reason and that made me 'snap' as well. I also dislike the new Ubuntu auto-install installer[0], which is an absurdly complex kludge that doesn't provide me any benefit over the old and trusted Debian installer. [0]: https://louwrentius.com/understanding-the-ubuntu-2004-lts-server-autoinstaller.html https://louwrentius.com/understanding-the-ubuntu-2004-lts-se...
dangus 3y ago
Well, that might depend how you define success. Android is by far the most commercially successful piece of software to come out of the Linux kernel (granted, pretty far detached at this point). If that’s not pure enough for you, I have to think that Valve’s Arch-based SteamOS drives more revenue than Canonical’s support contracts. Estimates point to around 3 million Steam Deck sales and then the software revenue on top of it, which should amount to at least 10x Canonical’s revenue. Then you look at the elephants in the room with enterprise Linux: I have to think that RHEL pulls in more support contracts than Canonical, Amazon Linux similarly has a place as a default option for Linux in AWS, and you’ve also got Oracle in the mix in terms of not-Debian enterprise distributions with widespread adoption.
chrismarlow9 3y ago
For my daily driver I went Freebsd->Ubuntu->Debian and have been really happy since. I tend to run older machines that are gifted to me from friends. Debian combined with xfce I rarely have performance issues and actually way better experience than other distro specifically targeted at older hardware (lubuntu, dsl, etc)
krylon 3y ago
Debian is a boring system in the best sense of the word. I've only become a more prolific Debian user in the last ten years or so, but in that time frame, I've found Debian to Just Work(tm) and to reliably keep on working as long as the hardware isn't misbehaving. It's the type of thing we only tend to notice when it doesn't work that way, but it's an impressive achievement.
- stavros 3y ago
  I recently bought a NUC (well, two, but only because they're cute) and I needed a boring OS to run my Harbormaster containers on, so I installed Debian. It's been perfect in the few days I've had it, because I don't have to dodge Ubuntu's ads left and right, or worry about what the hell snaps are doing. Otherwise, it's basically the same as Ubuntu. I very much recommend it.
  - Octabrain 3y ago
    > ...because I don't have to dodge Ubuntu's ads left and right... Is it Ubuntu that polluted with ads? Honest question as I haven't used it that much lately.
    - stavros 3y ago
      There's a bunch of stuff in the MOTD every time you log in, and then apt keeps telling you of all the nice security upgrades you could be enjoying if you were paying them, in a very "nice system you've got there, shame if anything happened to it" way.
      - boppo1 3y ago
        Haha too bad for them I ignore any terminal text that: - I didn't type myself - isn't a prompt of some sort - isn't an all caps warning before a prompt
        stavros 3y ago
29athrowaway 3y ago
Debian's name comes from Deb + Ian, a romantic relationship that ended. Then Ian had a tragic end. It is a name full of misfortune if you think about it. But as a distro, it is good. As an organization, it has had controversial moments that many people don't know about. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/03/msg00194.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/03/msg00194.html
PappGaborSandor 3y ago
I don't think successful is a good word to describe those distributions.
pdimitar 3y ago
Good arguments! I don't disagree with them. But let's not forget security updates and let's not forget that a lot of IT work requires modern kernel features. Deep learning is one of them I think (if I didn't misread a few articles extremely badly that is, which is very likely). The other is modern databases that need e.g. `io_uring`. I appreciate Debian for what it is, and I use it in VMs and containers. But for my own usage I prefer Arch (mostly Manjaro). Yes, even for servers. If you run a full system update at least once a week you will never stumble upon the possible problems of the rolling distro upgrades, by the way.
ldehaan 3y ago
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lost_tourist 3y ago
some of the most successful
crtified 3y ago
I am thankful that, despite what I see as The Bloating or heaviness of recent mainstream distros/direction, we still have the stable underlying it_just_works framework of Debian as a common factor, enabling user choice across a range of options. Essential anecdata : for the few computers in my household, the user experience and stability of certain mainstream Debian-based Linux distros cratered hard after, let's call it 20.x, and I doubt it would be possible to achieve the "I set up a 16.x machine for my parents in 2016, and to this day, It Just Runs, No Questions Asked, Ever" in the same way with today's equivalents - unless stepping back to a simpler incarnation of the Debian family. I'm thankful to be able to do that, and in my house, that thanks goes to the ever-present Debian.
0x6c6f6c 3y ago
The fact this article makes a point that the Free in FOSS stands for free of cost just as much as freedom. That's not the primary tenant of FOSS even if it is for Debian.
lproven 3y ago
I really must get in the habit of posting my own articles onto HN... >_<

257 points by pabs3 3y ago

I wonder if it was influenced by the fact that apt-get was much more mature than yum/whatever, at the beginning of mass broadband age. Before that, RedHat and RPM almost got rid of Debian.

INTPenis 3y ago
More mature in what way exactly? In the fact that it's faster? Because I wouldn't call starting services by default, or replacing conflicting services very mature. Maturity I would associate with stability and predictability. And regarding the speed, which is what most people mention online when they compare the two, it's only faster because apt-get update is a separate step.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  That does not sound like package system issue. Around 2003, Yum was a Python tool which took ages just to build dependency graph to do basic things.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Yes it was Python for a long time actually. And yet it still had very useful features like rollback and history. Things large government contracts kinda required.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      They don't require it at the OS level though, contracts like that require it on the state of the system as a whole and the typical way to deal with this is by using versioned backups and audit trails.
    - curt15 3y ago
      >And yet it still had very useful features like rollback and history. yum/dnf rollback is unreliable even today because the previously installed versions of packages might no longer be present in the repos.
      - dralley 3y ago
        Old versions are cached on your system for a few days, and most distros do keep a few old versions around just in case.
        BossingAround 3y ago
        I use Fedora as my daily driver for work and DNF rollback might as well not exist. It's atrocious. Even when turning on the local repo cache function (which keeps RPM packages on your system for some time in case you want to roll back), I have never been able to successfully roll back an upgrade that contained more than ~10-20 packages. I love Fedora, but DNF has atrocious UX.
      - INTPenis 3y ago
        That's mostly true for Fedora, because it's a fast rolling release they don't keep old packages around. It's not true for RHEL who strive to maintain backwards compatibility and stability.
- hnfong 3y ago
  I doubt "apt-get" was more advanced, but the breadth and quality of Debian's packages were unparalleled. Debian "stable" always just worked, and if you preferred newer packages, Testing and Unstable were usually a good compromise between stability and shiny. I haven't run Linux on my local machines for a couple years though, so maybe things have changed a bit, but if we're talking about the years where Debian gained "market" (mind?) share, then these are the reasons IMHO.
- midasuni 3y ago
  From memory when I moved to Debian about 2000, apt just worked, and redhat 5.2/6.0) had nothing to compare. It’s the main reason I changed. Wikipedia says yum wasn’t even a thing until 2002.
  - mekster 3y ago
    I think it even came from another distro called YellowDog Linux or something, hence the command name.
    - petepete 3y ago
      That's correct. YellowDog was based on Red Hat Linux but built for PowerPC computers.
dist-epoch 3y ago
I think it was more that Ubuntu was easier to use on the desktop, so developers would use that locally or in VMs and RedHat/CentOS on the server. But inevitably, they would also then push to deploy on Ubuntu servers to reduce friction. This was true for me, I hated dealing with CentOS because of the minor incompatibilities with Ubuntu, so whenever I had the chance, I pushed/chose Ubuntu on the servers. So little by little, you hook a generation on Ubuntu. It's a bit like the old Photoshop strategy, you let them pirate the software when young to hook them up, and then they would demand it professionally.
- mekster 3y ago
  Never seriously used Linux desktop but before several versions of RH, packages were so much older than Ubuntu, it was pretty impractical to use CentOS but people who don't know a thing about servers always chose CentOS because when they Google around, newbie blogs tend to use CentOS for no reason other than RedHat probably was more recognized as a vendor name. Ubuntu was always easier on the server with root user disabled by default and unattended-upgrades did its job without a hassle with newer packages. (It meant quite different if it was PHP 5 or 7.)
  - gilcot 3y ago
    Here, in France, established companies like dealing with big established providers and feel happy with licence contracts. Plus, a version last at least five years. (to compete Ubuntu had to come with four years LTS...) So when they have to use a GNU/Linux distribution, they tend to choose RHEL (Novell could have been a good choice but I don't know why they're not known or not well.) Many countries in Europe and in French speaking Africa countries also love RHEL. Consequence: when you couldn't sign/subscribe for RHEL, you pick CentOS.
devjab 3y ago
I think that it's because it's boring which in terms of economics translates directly into savings and safety. Look at RedHat, it has some really nice tools and frankly always had, but if you made it the backbone of your platforms engineering team for the previous 30 years. Well, then I think you would've have needed to "reschool/retrain" your engineers 3 or 4 times as the tool chain has changed drastically. Which is obviously not as dramatic as it may sound, but compare it to Debian where things operate pretty much how they always have. For some organizations there is benefit to continuously improving their platform engineering, but for many, technology is a tool that's required to do something else. They don't want to keep up with changes, and sometimes the changes aren't useful for them. On HackerNews most of the content and users are technology focused, but in the real world its the opposite. There is a reason why many enterprise organizations still run stuff on mainframes as an example. It's not because they want to, many have even spend hundreds of millions trying to exit, but the thing that's the most important is the stability to their core business. Now I don't want you to get the impression that I'm drawing a comparison between Debian and mainframes, my point is simply that to many organizations the ability to provide a stable support the core purpose of the organization is more important than anything else. Debian does that.
roenxi 3y ago
It might be Debian's slow release cycle. The people who comment & review love new things, because they can comment on them and review. But that creates a massive bias against the silent majority who dislike upgrades and don't want to think about the OS. Compare Debian to Fedora. Fedora there are multiple releases per year. Debian you have the protection of being in the herd for a good 2 years. Each release is a much more known quality and it is easier to find bugs and documentation for whatever it is that got broken in Bookworm. Investing in workarounds makes more sense because it won't be fixed in 6 months. Etc. Only software project I know where it seems likely that moving slow is a positive. But slow seems to work well for Debian. As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. EDIT Also, woah! Anticipating something like this sort of manoeuvre is a good reason to have avoided RHEL. Corporations. Not long term bastions of freedom. "However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public. The code is still available to Red Hat customers, as well as developers using free accounts, though under conditions that forbid redistribution of the source code." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Amen. An OS should get out of the way of the real work as much as possible. Any time spent on the OS itself by and end user is essentially time wasted that can never be recovered by writing or using a better application. An OS is essentially a delivery mechanism, not a goal in its own right.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  > As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. As a Fedora user, I like that someone pays for Fedora development, which (hopefully?) enforces standards in terms of code quality and QA, but also things like workplace policies etc. (e.g. I couldn't use software whose staff has been alleging sexual assault). I think the only non-corporate distro I'd use is Arch (which I did for a while, but Fedora is just so easy to use!) I should give Debian a try though for sure.
michaelt 3y ago
In the early 2000s, several things happened at around the same time. * Red Hat Linux (previously the go-to desktop linux) was discontinued in favour of RHEL/Fedora in ~2003. * Ubuntu was first released in 2004. * Around 2000 a new release would come as a CD image and the normal way of upgrading was to wipe out everything except your home directory. This meant trying out a new distro was pretty much as easy as upgrading your existing one. * As you say, although Yum was released in 2002, apt-get had been around since 1998, and so at that time was more mature. * Wifi became increasingly common, and almost always needed proprietary binary blobs. Proprietary ATI and nvidia linux drivers became available. And of course MP3 was widespread. Ubuntu arrived at an opportune moment - former Red Hat users looking for a new home, users used to wiping their system and installing a new distro, and clear benefits if wifi, graphics and MP3 all work out the box.
- reidrac 3y ago
  In my circles, and for a long time, "Ubuntu" meant "I can't install Debian". Because Debian used a text based install that required a bit more knowledge (and reading), and Ubuntu was more user friendly at the time.
  - varjag 3y ago
    Such a weird flex. Debian sure wasn't Slackware, it was one of the easiest distros to install and manage. It took years until commercial distros like RedHat could catch up.
    - stephenr 3y ago
      The point of the quote isn't that Debian is hard. It's that people chose a worse distro because they need hand holding. Consider a comparable quote: > Taskrabbit is an ancient Swedish word meaning "I can't assemble IKEA furniture".
    - brnt 3y ago
      The Debian install wizard is quite long and technical. I can see how Ubuntu (no more than a handful of questions) appeals.
oh_nice_marmot 3y ago
Definitely. From the time I started to mess around with Linux, around 96-98, the biggest distros were certainly Slackware, Debian and Red Hat. Slack you basically had to compile and config everything from scratch. RH helped a bit with packaged software in RPM format but dependency management was missing. Basically a glorified tar ball. apt solved the distribution and packaging of software.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I started my Linux journey (having being a user on SunOS previously) on a IBM ThinkPad 755CX with a Pentium-S. Installed Slackware from floppies, took literally days to compile a kernel or large program. Eventually I was using `slapt-get`, found that Ubuntu could have KDE installed, thought I'd had enough of config, make, make install (or `checkinstall -S`) and installed Ubuntu+KDE (and later Kubuntu). I still prefer .deb packages so now I'm looking at jumping ship, probably to MX Linux as Ubuntu is using more and more snaps and so far they've just caused me problems; I also have philosophical objections (not necessarily well-founded in logic!) against monolithic packages. Not sure why I started that reply, ... get off my lawn!
  - nraf 3y ago
    My apologies, I assumed your lawn was Open Course.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Lol, it is, help yourself to an apple from the tree too (the birds seem to have had them all though).
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  don't forget that in 96-98 we had S.u.S.E as the fourth biggest distro. And I remember that YaST managed dependencies with RPM in a user friendly way. Back in 1998-99 was my favourite distro because of that.
marcosdumay 3y ago
On the early days, if you get a RedHat CD-ROM, you wouldn't be able to install half of the packages there because they would conflict with the other half. And any update would change the conflicts, to the point in that updating it simply wasn't a thing. But technically, rpm was way more complete then dpkg. This changed with apt-get, as it took many years to the RPM distros to create yum.

jgb1984 3y ago

I've been using Debian as my daily driver on desktops, laptops and servers since Debian Potato (around the year 2000). My desktops often last over 10 years on a single install, upgrading from one release to the next, without a hitch. Debian is the best! For me it's the highest quality operating system with a super impressive governance organization behind it. Cheers to another 30 more years!

Noughmad 3y ago
> over 10 years on a single install, upgrading from one release to the next\ I mean, that's about one release upgrade
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Debian 6 was released in July, 2014. It is now August 2023 and stable is Debian 12. So that would be 6 stable releases in nine years.
vGPU 3y ago
Your New Year’s resolution doesn’t involve a fresh install? What? Only semi-joking. Wish I could but the constantly declining quality of Microsoft software has made it an absolute.

padjo 3y ago

The distro certainly has more longevity than the relationship that inspired its name.

butterNaN 3y ago
Context: "Debian was founded by Ian. First announced on August 16, 1993, by Ian Murdock, who initially called the system "the Debian Linux Release". The word "Debian" was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend (later ex-wife) Debra Lynn and his own first name. (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian)
IntelMiner 3y ago
Didn't the distro founder uh. Remove themselves from this mortal coil a few years back?
- jwilk 3y ago
  Yes: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/07/ian_murdock_autopsy/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/07/ian_murdock_autopsy/
  - greggsy 3y ago
    What an incredibly disrespectful article. The details surrounding his death, and the nature of the event, and not at all in the public’s interest, and likely serve to cause more anguish to the family and friends. Even the title is written inappropriately. In Australia at least, the journalistic standard [1] states that reports should avoid sensationalising suicide, and should not report on the methods. It’s also expected for support details to be added at the end of the story (this addendum is often the only indication that the persons’ death was the result of suicide). https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SPECIFIC_STANDARDS_SUICIDE_-_July_2014.pdf https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S...
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    .

xvilka 3y ago

The problem with Debian is their insistence on "stability" by not updating the packages. In the modern world, when software development speed picked up steam quite a lot, releases of new software happen much more often than distribution life cycles.

mschuster91 3y ago
That's not a problem, that's a feature. If you're on Debian or Ubuntu LTS, you (generally) don't have to worry about something breaking by running `apt upgrade` to keep up with security fixes - only release upgrades can and will give you trouble, but eh, that's to be expected.
- znpy 3y ago
  Yes in theory, mot really in practice. Many times I’ve add to add external/weird repositories to get some functionalities i rrallneeded (eg: appropriate codecs fir bluetooth audio and a version of bluez that supported by bluetooth headsets) and that kind of tainting really endangers the longevity of a debian-based system. I understand that the fault is completely on the external repositories and on the user… however the choice then is to be able to use my hardware (or, in general, to the kind if computing i need) or not. These days I’m using fedora btw, which has been really stable while providing fairly up-to-date packages.
  - fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
    I think if you're finding debian too slow you're probably not valuing stability to the same level. That's not a problem with debian, that's just a mismatch in needs, you're probably better off with a "less" stable operating system.
    - znpy 3y ago
      > That's not a problem with debian, that's just a mismatch in needs, you're probably better off with a "less" stable operating system. I'll be honest, i haven't had any stability issues with Fedora either, and i've been upgrading as often as i would with Debian. And in both cases, i'm using fairly old and known hardware (years old thinkpads, the T440 and the X270).

susam 3y ago

I have been using Debian GNU/Linux since 2006. Debian 3.1 Sarge was the first version I used. The primary reason for choosing Debian back then was the large number of packages it had in its package repositories. Its exceptional stability came as a bonus. Over these 17 years, I have used Debian for frontend servers, backend servers, desktop computers, personal laptops, personal virtual machines, team virtual machines, etc. I run my static HTML websites, Common Lisp web applications, ZNC IRC network bouncer, Exim4 MTA, Matrix-IRC bridging clients, etc. all on Debian. I also spin up fresh new Debian VMs to serve as clean rooms for testing my open source projects and technical guides. For example, when I published my "Lisp in Vim" article, Debian turned out to be a nice system to quickly install all the necessary packages and test out all the steps in my article thoroughly. When I write a shell script to be used across a variety of shells, I run my test suite for the script on bash, ksh, zsh, dash, posh, and yash, all of which can be easily installed on Debian. Debian has served me very well for a wide variety of activities ranging from things like software development and testing to personal digital chores like writing documents, presentations, splitting and merging PDFs, editing audio/video files, document format conversions, editing photographs, etc. and even having fun, say by raytracing with POV-Ray, running vintage DOS games on DOSBox, or recording live music from my digital piano. No matter what the nature of the problem is, the solution often begins with a simple "apt-get install" command. In all these years, I have never ever faced any problem with dependency management or package installation in the stable branch. Yes, the packages can sometimes begin to get old by a few years but the whole system remains outstandingly stable. It is a great distribution for long running servers. Debian is also quite good for a lean personal computing environment. In my opinion, the Debian stable version sets the gold standard for stability in the world of Linux distributions.

rycomb 3y ago
My favorites are Debian for servers, Arch for desktops. Debian in desktops didn't really work for me... a rolling release makes more sense.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Debian unstable and testing are rolling releases.

MrStonedOne 3y ago

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Chiba-City 3y ago

[dead]

caboteria 3y ago

I've recently noticed a new market which Debian is dominating: "official" Docker container images. If you "docker run golang" or "docker run ruby" or "docker run python" (or many of the images tagged as docker official images) then you're running Debian.

bornfreddy 3y ago
Either that, or Alpine (if musl is acceptable).
- paradox460 3y ago
  The tcp and dns quirks of musl generally make it unacceptable for many things, sadly
  - makeworld 3y ago
    musl now supports dns over tcp.

louwrentius 3y ago

I've had several issues with Ubuntu on servers and Raspberry Pis, so recently I've decided to switch (back) to Debian. In particular, Ubuntu snapd decided to fill my /tmp folder with gigabytes of data for no apparent reason and that made me 'snap' as well. I also dislike the new Ubuntu auto-install installer[0], which is an absurdly complex kludge that doesn't provide me any benefit over the old and trusted Debian installer. [0]: https://louwrentius.com/understanding-the-ubuntu-2004-lts-server-autoinstaller.html https://louwrentius.com/understanding-the-ubuntu-2004-lts-se...

dangus 3y ago

Well, that might depend how you define success. Android is by far the most commercially successful piece of software to come out of the Linux kernel (granted, pretty far detached at this point). If that’s not pure enough for you, I have to think that Valve’s Arch-based SteamOS drives more revenue than Canonical’s support contracts. Estimates point to around 3 million Steam Deck sales and then the software revenue on top of it, which should amount to at least 10x Canonical’s revenue. Then you look at the elephants in the room with enterprise Linux: I have to think that RHEL pulls in more support contracts than Canonical, Amazon Linux similarly has a place as a default option for Linux in AWS, and you’ve also got Oracle in the mix in terms of not-Debian enterprise distributions with widespread adoption.

chrismarlow9 3y ago

For my daily driver I went Freebsd->Ubuntu->Debian and have been really happy since. I tend to run older machines that are gifted to me from friends. Debian combined with xfce I rarely have performance issues and actually way better experience than other distro specifically targeted at older hardware (lubuntu, dsl, etc)

krylon 3y ago

Debian is a boring system in the best sense of the word. I've only become a more prolific Debian user in the last ten years or so, but in that time frame, I've found Debian to Just Work(tm) and to reliably keep on working as long as the hardware isn't misbehaving. It's the type of thing we only tend to notice when it doesn't work that way, but it's an impressive achievement.

stavros 3y ago
I recently bought a NUC (well, two, but only because they're cute) and I needed a boring OS to run my Harbormaster containers on, so I installed Debian. It's been perfect in the few days I've had it, because I don't have to dodge Ubuntu's ads left and right, or worry about what the hell snaps are doing. Otherwise, it's basically the same as Ubuntu. I very much recommend it.
- Octabrain 3y ago
  > ...because I don't have to dodge Ubuntu's ads left and right... Is it Ubuntu that polluted with ads? Honest question as I haven't used it that much lately.
  - stavros 3y ago
    There's a bunch of stuff in the MOTD every time you log in, and then apt keeps telling you of all the nice security upgrades you could be enjoying if you were paying them, in a very "nice system you've got there, shame if anything happened to it" way.
    - boppo1 3y ago
      Haha too bad for them I ignore any terminal text that: - I didn't type myself - isn't a prompt of some sort - isn't an all caps warning before a prompt
      - stavros 3y ago

29athrowaway 3y ago

Debian's name comes from Deb + Ian, a romantic relationship that ended. Then Ian had a tragic end. It is a name full of misfortune if you think about it. But as a distro, it is good. As an organization, it has had controversial moments that many people don't know about. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/03/msg00194.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/03/msg00194.html

PappGaborSandor 3y ago

I don't think successful is a good word to describe those distributions.

pdimitar 3y ago

Good arguments! I don't disagree with them. But let's not forget security updates and let's not forget that a lot of IT work requires modern kernel features. Deep learning is one of them I think (if I didn't misread a few articles extremely badly that is, which is very likely). The other is modern databases that need e.g. `io_uring`. I appreciate Debian for what it is, and I use it in VMs and containers. But for my own usage I prefer Arch (mostly Manjaro). Yes, even for servers. If you run a full system update at least once a week you will never stumble upon the possible problems of the rolling distro upgrades, by the way.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

lost_tourist 3y ago

some of the most successful

crtified 3y ago

I am thankful that, despite what I see as The Bloating or heaviness of recent mainstream distros/direction, we still have the stable underlying it_just_works framework of Debian as a common factor, enabling user choice across a range of options. Essential anecdata : for the few computers in my household, the user experience and stability of certain mainstream Debian-based Linux distros cratered hard after, let's call it 20.x, and I doubt it would be possible to achieve the "I set up a 16.x machine for my parents in 2016, and to this day, It Just Runs, No Questions Asked, Ever" in the same way with today's equivalents - unless stepping back to a simpler incarnation of the Debian family. I'm thankful to be able to do that, and in my house, that thanks goes to the ever-present Debian.

0x6c6f6c 3y ago

The fact this article makes a point that the Free in FOSS stands for free of cost just as much as freedom. That's not the primary tenant of FOSS even if it is for Debian.

lproven 3y ago

I really must get in the habit of posting my own articles onto HN... >_<