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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Debian or Debian derived distros for quite a while, everything from straight up Debian on various servers, Armbian for my SBC's, to my secondary PC running Kubuntu and later KDE Neon.

For me as a more casual Linux user, it's great as it essentially "just works" and I don't have to invest a great deal of time to fiddle with auxiliary things.

However, if I could get one wish, it was to ditch the codenames. As someone who's not on the dev mailing list, I find it so confusing when people reference the Debian version just by codename and have to search just about every time to make sure I understand what's what.

Regardless, a big thanks to the contributors!

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The code names make issues with specific versions or eras easy to search

Ubuntu at least does it in alphabetical order of the first letter of the codename. Eg, the release after Ubuntu 20.04 Focal was Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy. This means that hearing the Ubuntu codename "Bionic" provides some information: it was 4 releases before Focal.

But Debian codenames are arbitrarily based on characters from the movie Toy Story, so there's no relation to the Debian release.

To fix this, I propose for future releases the Debian codename naming scheme be replaced with numbers written out in words. Eg.

Debian 14 (fourteen)

Debian 13 (thirteen)

Debian 12 (twelve)

Debian 11 (bullseye)

Debian 10 (buster)

Debian 9 (stretch)

Debian 8 (jessie)

This retains the ability to easily search for eg, "Debian Thirteen", while making it much easier to remember earlier codenames as time goes on.

Also unlike Ubuntu's alphabetical naming scheme, the number approach doesn't have any overflow issues (which isn't as big of an issue anyway because Debian's provides new releases every 2 years instead of 6 monthly).

Sure; but (IMHO) I think the code names provide an visible and fun reminder that this operating is a operating system for hackers, and this is a tiny bit of personality from that ethos baked into the system.

Debian labels itself the 'universal operating system', and makes no aspirations to cater to the lowest common denominator of users.

>Debian labels itself the 'universal operating system', and makes no aspirations to cater to the lowest common denominator of users.

That's a bit of a contradiction.

Universal operating system for a wide variety of hardware, but some expertise is assumed for the user.

Kind of a novel choice now that I think about it... most projects aim for more users, which means less assumed knowledge, which necessitates more limits on hardware. Not a bad choice, just different.

Since debian both provide version numbers and codenames, I don't think making codename same as the release version makes any sense.

When I google Debian 5, I get results to Debian Lenny (which is 5). Also Debian denotes versions in official notices and it's widespread in internet so, codenames are not hindering anything in practice.

OTOH, codenames play a bigger role in the ecosystem. It adds motivation, fun and sense of originality. I love to have them, I love they're in fact Toy Story characters.

It makes it almost lifelike and masks the burden of maintaining one of the biggest distro projects in the existence.

While I love minimalism and utility, I think Debian should keep these. It's fun, memorable and original.

As someone who doesn't use Debian as my only (or even main) OS, but does manage a few Debian servers, I completely disagree on memorable. I can never remember the order of code names and whenever I read something like "stretch or later" I always have to Google to find out if the servers I have qualify or not.

Other than that, I have zero complaints about Debian

> whenever I read something like "stretch or later" I always have to Google to find out if the servers I have qualify or not

This is exactly my problem as well.

Oh well, luxury problem in the grand scheme of things.

> I can never remember the order of code names...

Me neither, don't worry about it :)

> I read something like "stretch or later"...

Well, they're really irresponsible if they're writing like that. All of the places I've seen, downloaded debs either write Debian 9+ or Debian 9+ (Stretch and later) or any similar fashion.

I didn't encounter any Debian $codename only compatibility notes. I also don't write $codename only readme files, etc.

> All of the places I've seen, downloaded debs either write Debian 9+ or Debian 9+

Just a couple of recent examples I stumbled upon:

https://www.armbian.com/nanopi-r2s/#kernels-archive-all

https://louwrentius.com/configuring-scst-iscsi-target-on-deb...

Sure a bit of searching lets me figure out what's what but...

If it helps, the list of Debian codenames is here:

https://www.debian.org/releases/

Also the corresponding Devuan (systemd-free Debian) release names, with "Bullseye" equating to "Chimera":

https://www.devuan.org/os/releases

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