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.

  • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

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

      Proxmox also is Debian based so it inherits the stability

        • Nik282000@lemmy.ca
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • TCB13@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 year ago

      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

    • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        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

        • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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?

    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • danielfgom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        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

  • TCB13@lemmy.world
    40·
    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.

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
      10·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • RavenFellBlade@startrek.website
        1·
        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.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
      9·
      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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      61·
      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

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
      2·
      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

    • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • eah@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • duncesplayed@lemmy.oneEnglish
      4·
      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.

  • dino@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    51·
    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.