Why is Debian the way it is?

pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 244 points –
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Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It鈥檚 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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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.

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

Proxmox also is Debian based so it inherits the stability

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

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.

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

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 馃槀 Looks like they haven't learnt a thing lol

And it鈥檚 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.

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

From what I鈥檝e 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?

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

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.

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

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