> only Debian is truly community controlled, and thus only Debian truly embodies the ideals of FOSS. I believed this up until the systemd thing. Whether you be

> only Debian is truly community controlled, and thus only Debian truly embodies the ideals of FOSS. I believed this up until the systemd thing. Whether you believe that the community legitimately chose it or not, it certainly undermined the ideals of FOSS - you can no longer patch or swap out any piece of the system (Debian used to be famous for taking this as far as even letting you swap out the kernel) and still have something that works. > as great as unpatched "pure" upstream repos seem to be, the Debian community patches tend to help more than they hurt Nah. Remember their SSH key-generation bug, still the worst bug ever shipped in a general-purpose OS - that was an inevitable consequence of Debian's attitude to upstream, and they have made no process changes to prevent a recurrence. Or try to follow any Tomcat tutorial on Debian with a version you installed through the system package manager. Or try to do development work in Python or JavaScript or Ruby (really, any language that isn't C or Perl) on Debian without giving up and installing your own parallel user-managed set of the same packages. Debian is the apotheosis of a certain approach to building Linux distros. But it's also proof of the flaws in that approach. Slackware, Gentoo or FreeBSD are more reliable and FOSSey. Fedora, SUSE or Ubuntu are more polished and easier.