4 ms·

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 R

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.

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.