Debian GNU/Linux Turns 27 Years Old

[DeepDayze]

11 happy years for Debian and here's to it getting even better with age. Never had a problem with Debian and I've started with Slackware which got me to learn what makes Linux tick and Debian became my daily driver OS 15 years ago today. Not even Fedora can touch Debian for its versatility and the strength of its package management and development.

[jacob]

I hope it finally dies because it has a garbage installer

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It has an adequate installer for what its purpose and target user base are. If you want a fully integrated, plug-n-play, user friendly installer, that's Ubuntu-Fedora territory. Do you blame Arch or Gentoo for having a "garbage installer"?

outdated packages with a policy that adds pointless work by backporting fixes

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Debian is all about stability and long term support. This is the antithesis of compiling random code from upstream and especially of "easy" backports.

a crappy package manager

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Still the best out there. You are far, far, far less likely to run into dependency hell or end up with a broken and dysfunctional OS on Debian (or other deb/APT-based distros) than on any other OS.

and a policy regarding licensing that's completely orthogonal to what FSF is saying

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and a policy regarding licensing that's completely orthogonal to what FSF is saying

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The FSF is not Gospel. Debian's licencing policy is one that has worked well for Debian, that's the only thing that matters. I presume you wish BSD died too because its licencing policy is not just orthogonal, but in some ways contrary to the FSF's?

It also splits out development packages out for no good reason

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To the contrary, it does it for excellent reasons. Development packages belong to development machines. End-user workstations or deployment production systems don't need them and shouldn't have them.

making it much more annoying to hunt down packages to compile software from source, because not everything is in the repos

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See above.

and not everything should even be there (like suckless software).

Indeed.

[AndyChow]

I've been using debian since 2001. These days, it's only used by the "sacrifice" employee, that has to be able to confirm QA to prod, which is debian as stability is required in prod. Everyone else uses either Mint or Arch.

[gojul]

I've been using debian since 2001. These days, it's only used by the "sacrifice" employee, that has to be able to confirm QA to prod, which is debian as stability is required in prod. Everyone else uses either Mint or Arch.

On the contrary I find Debian to be what Ubuntu was when it was at its roots : something lightweight and that just works. Ubuntu is no longer this, with many bugs (even though LTS releases are more polished) and has become as heavy as hell. Plus some political directions Canonical follows that I don't like. I switched to Debien when there was the Kubuntu melodrama, as I'm mainly a KDE guy.

[lowflyer]

Originally posted by DoMiNeLa10 View Post
a crappy package manager

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Still the best out there. You are far, far, far less likely to run into dependency hell or end up with a broken and dysfunctional OS on Debian (or other deb/APT-based distros) than on any other OS..

While I'm absolutely with you on all the other points, you're wrong on calling apt "still the best out there". Pacman is a significantly better at keeping your system stable. Apt can do the same only if you never, ever use sid.

[Adarion]

Happy birthday!
It's an interesting distribution, vast list of packages supported, base for many other distributions. Supporting from i486 (true 386 maybe with older kernels + glibc?) and many non-x86 arches. But also rocked and rattled by the winds of time; decisions not everyone liked (systemd, that kinda locks out non-Linux-kernels and has benefits but also drawbacks on Linux), a mysterious and untimely death of its mastermind...

[Vistaus]

Most of that's wrong, The installer is probably the easiest to use, very straightforward.

Backporting is hardly pointless, As sid is upto date.

APT is far from crappy, It does a very good job at maintaining the system and makes more sense in it's commands than pacman.

Show me a distro that HAS everything, Debian's repository is probably the largest around. And if it's not there...Well thats why we have git.

I do find Synaptic pretty crappy, though, and pacman is more straightforward to me, even though I "grew up" with Ubuntu and only later switched to Arch (and am now back at Debian more or less because I'm using Deepin V20) and I find pacman handles things a bit better. But you could do a lot worse than apt (you hear me eopkg and dnf? just to name a few), that's for sure

I agree with you on everything else, though

[jacob]

While I'm absolutely with you on all the other points, you're wrong on calling apt "still the best out there". Pacman is a significantly better at keeping your system stable. Apt can do the same only if you never, ever use sid.

Well as I said, I see Debian's use case primarily as a LTS platform and I would say that apt is the best for that. Obviously if you enable sid, you end up more or less with a rolling release and if that's what you want, you should definitely rather use a distro that's actually designed for that, like arch with pacman.

One problem is if you want to keep a stable OS and only use sid to update particular apps. I agree that on an deb/apt system that can end up terribly, but then IMO that's what snap and flatpak are for.

[lowflyer]

Well as I said, I see Debian's use case primarily as a LTS platform and I would say that apt is the best for that. Obviously if you enable sid, you end up more or less with a rolling release and if that's what you want, you should definitely rather use a distro that's actually designed for that, like arch with pacman.

One problem is if you want to keep a stable OS and only use sid to update particular apps. I agree that on an deb/apt system that can end up terribly, but then IMO that's what snap and flatpak are for.

I have to disagree here. I used to be a strong supporter of apt because it was light-years ahead of other package management systems at that time. I made it even a "requirement" for my computer systems. However, after repeatedly running into issues with it, I dared to change. And now, a bit wiser over the years, I have to say: pacman does the same job just significantly better. I no longer have these half-yearly recurring events to manually fix graphic drivers - or two-yearly recurring events where you have to re-install the whole system because something had damaged the package database beyond repairs.

Perhaps Debian is only usable in "stable". (say: LTS platform) But who wants to run two-year old software? Even Ubuntu did a better job at keeping the system stable, even with the problematic PPA's. Perhaps it's not even apt's fault, perhaps it's something in the way how they use it. I'm not saying apt is bad, I'm just saying "pacman is better".

[piorunz]

Image included in the article (presenting some console with Debian) is unreadable, no way to open better quality.