this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023

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Why is Debian the way it is? (blog.liw.fi)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Great article. It sums up Debian well and illustrates why it is so rock solid. In short, they package and test everything themselves so there's no room for malware or broken packages.

Yes the release cycle is much slower but in return you have a super stable and reliable system. Which is why so many IT admins love to use Debian for servers. Servers need to not change quickly. They need to stay the same, be rock solid, preferably never be shut down and keep going for at least a decade if not more. Debian is ideal for this.

And it's 100% community based - no corporations messing in here. That's why I switched from regular Linux Mint to LMDE 6. I'm tired of Ubuntu, Fedora/Red Hat and their corporate BS.

Long live Debian. May it never change.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah you bet. Know what's funny, when all kinds of hell broke lose because of the CentOS mess the same people that complained about the move a few weeks later were moving to Ubuntu 😂 Looks like they haven't learnt a thing lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Those are the same type of people that moved from twitter to bluesky.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

😂.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Debian everywhere. Its solid and I can forget about it for years.

Proxmox also is Debian based so it inherits the stability

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I still haven't tried Proxmox. I need to look into it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Do it. Proxmox is fucking awesome

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I work with 2 guys (electrician and mechanic) who both swear by it. I'm still on plane Jane Deb + LXC but I am very tempted by Proxmox's ability to migrate containers/vms between machines. Makes it really easy to test services before deploying them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Migrating between machines would be a very handy feature, as well as for backup.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Debian fire servers? I'm not familiar with this term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol, thanks. I didn't catch that mistake. I've corrected it 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh Debian for servers.. lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

😂

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And it’s 100% community based - no corporations messing in here.

I'm pretty sure Canonical has a say regardless. If it was community based they wouldn't've changed the init system single-sidedly; or would've gone the way of the Gentoo and given users choice on which init to use. Debian's been weird in the last few years. A distro that once boasted about running in many architectures has been constantly dropping non-mainstream ones... etc, etc.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To have a say they would have to sit on the board. No idea if they do or not. They do have to contribute back to Debian with code improvements but as far as I know they don't have any say over the direction.

I suspect it's lack of hands that resulted in them dropping some support. They are pretty stretched as it is.

From what I've read from other comments, the move to systemd was pretty much decided by the entire dev community because it made things easier. Debian was apparently slower to adopt it but saw where the concensus was and went with that.

Anyway, if they are ever compromised there are other community distros

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I’ve read from other comments, the move to systemd was pretty much decided by the entire dev community because it made things easier. Debian was apparently slower to adopt it but saw where the concensus was and went with that.

Give the mailing list archives of the time some reading, the decision was definitely not consensual. I'm glad gentoo, slackware and, later devuan did not take the easy way out. Being few (their site lists ~1100) as an argument, well.. dunno, fairly understandable maybe.

What do you mean by compromised?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where do I find the archives? That would be interesting to read.

By compromised I mean that somehow some corporate entity started dictating their decisions, decisions not in favour of Libre principles and against the community

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://lists.debian.org/ i think they changed in Jessie.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks 👍

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was surprised to learn they build all dependencies themselves. This must be an absolute killer amount of work.

Do you have a good ressource to learn the differences between Mint and LMDE? I'm considering making a Linux partition to work more efficiently (Blender, Krita, perhaps Kdenlive), and I'd feel a tad safer knowing the distro I choose is not based off Ubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure about resources but you could try the Debian website for info about Debian 12 which LMDE 6 uses

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

debian #1
arch #2
ubuntu #i only use it because it's popular

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Why is Debian the way it is?

Because it's stable. Not some poorly bundled OS that has broken installers on their website for weeks like Ubuntu does sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

How exactly does a sun set? How exactly does a posi-trac rear end on a Plymouth work? It just does!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That rabbit hole just absorbed a bunch of time.
What's a good modern mailing list visualizer?

[+] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd always argue for Linux Mint Debian Edition, especially for noobs. Regular Mint is fine too, but they have not announced its future as far as I know. What with Ubuntu going all in on snaps and all that. Personally I think they should just make LMDE the default Mint and call it a day. Let Mint 21.3 be the last version and then go all in on the debian base.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Came here for this. I enjoy all three flavors of Mint, personally. XFCE is probably one of the best "lightweight" distros put there and rarely gets mentioned. Cinnamon is perfect for anyone looking for a more user-friendly Ubuntu derivative, and LMDE is probably the most approachable Debian distro out there.

Mint is a great starter distro for just about everybody.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I always point people to PopOS. Like Ubuntu and Fedora, it is backed by a company meaning there are dedicated developers who are paid to work on it. System76 also makes hardware for normal humans so it is tailored for the average person.

The thing about suggesting distros is we are inclined to tell people all the options. I say use PopOS and don't give them any other choices. Has worked well for me so far.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Vanilla just means they have no ideas about changing anything. It may be good to not duplicate effords or annoy Desktop developers. But its not really something crazy great

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think Debian is great for servers but for desktop use for casual/new Linux users it's not the best, IMO. The install ISO can lack drivers (one with non-free drivers is available but hard to find), the installer is not great (although I heard it's gotten better since I last tried), non-free packages are not in the repos, packages are stable but that can also be out of date. It is vanilla but I don't think it's the best UX.

I think Debian derivatives are easier to sell like Mint, PopOS, maybe Ubuntu (yeah, yeah snaps/malware/etc.). If they're a bit on the techy side maybe EndeavorOS just because Arch Wiki and AUR are pretty sweet. If they're 13 and wear hoodies Kali ;P

But it all depends on the use case right. If I set up a laptop for my Mom and she only surfs the Web and uses a word processor and it just needs to be reliable and not break on updates, I think Debian is great for that. But for someone that wants to explore a bit or has to install it themselves I think there's better options.

Also I feel that 'help my Debian is having $issue' vs 'help my Mint/PopOS/Ubuntu is having $issue' is going to bring up different styles of answers. Debian forums or articles may expect a level of competence that is not expected for distros often recommended to beginners.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Debian is the most stable and usable distro I have ever used on a desktop. I have tried many distros in my life, Debian is the one that's been satisfying me the most so far.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Great! I use Debian for all my server VMs. I'm not saying it's bad or anything and I definitely think it's worth a shot once the user enters the distro hopping phase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

LMDE for your mum

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that would be easier.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Please define what you mean by vanilla.

For people who want a desktop, I either tell them to install it themselves or go for LMDE if they don't really care as much. But I wouldn't voluntarily use Debian, I don't like distributions running Systemd

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do Debian and other distros feel about Rust? It's a fantastic language that can improve security, but it doesn't have a stable ABI and they don't really do the whole dynamically linked library thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's a really good question which seems to have a complicated answer. This page here led me to this here (among other documents).

The short of it seems to be have that if you think of Rust in terms of "crates" instead of "libraries", then it's still possible to package in a way that conforms to Debian's self-contained avoid-redundancy style, though the details of it seem a bit tricky.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The high-quality of debian packages is supposed to be a myth if you compared package amount with the available staff actually being able to check packages.