Debian celebrates 30 years | Hacker News Reader

Debian celebrates 30 years

bits.debian.org

344 pointssusam104 comments

The most important feature of Debian has been its governance and focus on community. That's the difference between it and CentOS or its derivatives, and why I'll keep using it forever - it's fundamentally sustainable. Here's to 30 more years!

I wish we could achieve this for package management in almost any ecosystem. It's got me pretty bummed lately.

Hear hear! Thank you Debian contributors!

I wish the CentOS forkers would see this in particular: it's just been amazing to see them continue to want to build on such shifting sands you fundamentally don't control. There _is_ a community-controlled distro that also has does stable and long term releases, and it is Debian! And it's really great!

Debian is the only linux distro that has been able to manage an unbroken line of upgrades working across systems for many, many years. No other distro that I'm aware of has been able to do this without botching upgrades to the point that a reinstall was the only option left. That, and it's governance model and staying true to their mission are all major accomplishments.

It's a pity that Ian Murdock did not live to see his brainchild become 30. I owe that man a lot.

In the 15 or so years I've been using Debian I can't remember ever having any issues with upgrades. It has always just worked smooth as butter for me. Every one of my devices (except phone and Steam Deck of course) is running Debian, and hopefully they always will!

I think I'll celebrate it's birthday by wearing my Debian t-shirt today :)

Upgrades are always a pain for me but afaict it's entirely self-inflicted by making a franken-Debian. (http://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian)

I wonder if anyone has attempted a full first-release to modern Debian upgrade. Bonus if it was done on real hardware

Might be something fun for NCommander

That's a very cool idea.

I wanted to do it for the 30th anniversary, but lacked the time.

Well, in 2033 you'll be just in time :)

I have a laptop running openSUSE Leap that I've been upgrading every year without problems since 2017. I only use it for listening to podcasts and watching the occasional video, but still.

OpenBSD, too, has been a pleasure in this regard. I have another laptop that I originally installed 6.7 on and have been upgrading ever since, again without a problem (again, though, I only use it for watching videos and sometimes for testing/debugging code).

Having said that, Debian's track record in this regard is very impressive indeed.

2017 is relatively recent. I’ve been upgrading the same Debian installation since the early 2000s.

Wow, that is a long time.

Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147617

Debian is more important than ever, in face of corporations abusing open source.

As somebody who's gone from: RedHat 5/6 -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Debian. Debian (and it's derivatives) is the best of breed and will always be my distro of choice. Great job yall!

You need to be more specific with Red Hat :). I'm guessing you meant like "GNOME 1.2" era Red Hat that came on a CheapBytes CD.

My first distro was Red Hat 5 as well. It is disambigous, it was called "Red Hat Linux version 5". Red Hat Linux went to version 9 I believe before it split into RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora.

I have almost the same way: Redhat 5 -> Mandrake -> Gentoo -> FreeBSD -> Slackware, and finally Debian Etch in April 2007. I've been using Debian for the latest 16 years and am very happy with it.

My favorite distro, I use it exclusively for the last 4 year. I have Debian Testing on my laptop (T14), workstation, Pi4. Works great. Meanwhile I've been trying Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD, but Debian is the best.

I'm very pleased with Debian 11 XFCE as a daily driver on one of my laptops.

With only a very few caveats, it can be installed, with a nice looking UI. (Wrote up a few notes for myself at [1]).

Even bluetooth works perfect, connecting my Bose headset flawlessly, which even the latest Linux Mint had problem with.

The only thing I haven't got working is connecting my Phone (A Sony Xperia 10 II), and our old printer. I'm sure it is possible, but haven't found a quick solution, and have so little time for fiddling. It's a bummer, since a plain Debian (XFCE) install is so very clean and stable!

[1] https://rillabs.com/posts/installing-and-configuring-debian-...

Still remember being introduced to it in 2005 while working in the UK as sailing instructor for a summer job. An older guy showed me how he automated cataloging his grandma's possessions for auction with it, which deeply fascinated me.

Back home, after lots of trial and error, I used it to run a mail- and webserver for my first business.

Still running Debian for the past 20 years and still hosting my own stuff in my closet! Thank you Debian!

It’s more common now but Debian was the first distribution that really opened Linux up for beginners like me. No offence, Slackware.

Many derivatives have been able to expand in other directions because of the ability of Debian to create beginners.

HBD!

Yup, I started with RedHat... forget what version, 4, probably 5? Really couldn't get behind the rpm system. I think Debian might have been like the 2nd or 3rd distro I tried and it stuck a lot better. This was back in... 97 or 98? or so.

Still using it today in the home lab/personal server in the basement.

Raw rpm was horrible. I used it and I wrote about it, but it was a nightmare. I think I sold an article which was just "here is how to install KDE 2.0 on Red Hat Linux". It was about 3 pages long, and included something like 200 dependency packages that you had to hand-install, one by one.

I am curious to hear what Debian was like before APT came along in 1997 or so.

Slackware in my circles around '99 was always the elitist option from day one.

You were using Debian, Red Hat or SuSE? Not Slackware? Pfff... normie.

I think that consolidated it as difficult for beginners. The fact it offered very few technical advantages was the nail in the coffin.

I remember I used SuSE for ages based solely on how good Yast and Yast2 were. Its almost quaint to remember how Linux was back in the day, where an installer/setup tool that actually managed to make your system fully usable and configured without any extra tweaking or compiling kernel modules for hardware support was an honest to god selling point and killer feature.

Reflecting back on it makes me appreciate all the early gurus who got us to where we are now.

Same here.

But I tried Ubuntu "Warty Warthog" and jumped ship.

Same, via a Raspberry Pi :]

Debian was my first Linux. Since then I mostly use OpenBSD—love its simplicity—but whenever I need to take full advantage of modern hardware I head back to Debian (usually the Testing release).

My first experience with Debian was though its package format, when I was fed up with constant frustrations from RPM as a way to deliver software to an operations team. (I had spent too many hours searching for format and behavior docs, only to find a couple of outdated text files full of ambiguities and omissions.) Given that Red Hat was widely considered the premier distro for businesses at the time, I didn't have high hopes for something better. Boy, was I in for a pleasant surprise.

Debian's documentation was precise, comprehensive, and easy to find. It was clear from reading it that its authors were dedicated to creating a maintainable, sustainable system, even in the face of weird edge cases and failures. It went so far as to include versioned documentation and policy releases, with each one including clearly worded explanations of what changed since the previous version and (often) how to update existing packaging. Talk about exceeding expectations. This was better than any commercial software docs I had seen in ages.

What a relief. The day or two I spent putting together my first Debian package was more than worth it in the long run. I migrated my servers as soon as I could, and it has served me well ever since. Nowadays, it's running my desktop/gaming systems, too.

Thanks for the excellent work, Debian contributors. I feel fortunate to have found you.

Happy birthday! Wouldn't reach for anything else when I need predictability and stability on my system. Here's to forever!

Happy Birthday Debian!

I played around with Potato, started to felt in love with Woody, and since Sarge Debian has been my one and only distro.

Holy crap, it wasn't until this moment that I realized they're all Toy Story characters...

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Yep https://wiki.debian.org/ToyStory

As I was falling asleep last night I had another realization about this naming scheme that made me laugh pretty hard. I always wondered why Debian unstable was named Sid. https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Sid

Dito, with the difference that I also used RHEL and ArchLinux a lot. But my main box, the one that needed to work: Debian.

Started with the TSX distro about 30 years ago then RedHat then Suse then, 25 years ago, Debian. Never looked back.

What was TSX? I don't remember that one.

tsx was a MIT server that hosted minix, Linux, etc. It wasn't a distribution per se.

Oh very nice. I’m vaguely aware of some of the interesting servers they used to have but mostly via the GNU stuff. apple-gunkies, etc.

yeah, now you say it, I think it were some CD's containing a copy of the TSX archive. Installing from that source was like playing Quake in nightmare mode :-) Took me months to get the sound working :-)

Was there any investigation on the policemen involved in the death of Ian Murdoch, the "ian" in Debian?

The wikipedia page is pretty complete.

I'm not entirely sure would be needed. The circumstances of his death are tragic but also pretty much what I expect from someone in his position. The tendency among the tech community is to think expertise and intelligence applies across fields, its the perfect Dunning-Krugar trap. He was drunk as hell, and adamant he knew more then the police. Everything follows from that and his twitter rants that night about how he's 'a white man-- not a n**ger' and talking about how much money he made just reinforces that.

Where did he say that? Why do you spread lies?

https://archive.ph/20151229023650/https://twitter.com/imurdo...

Where did he say the word nigger?

He was clearly shaken, but he had a good point about fighting against police brutality, and he understood that it was about class, power and opportunity, not skin color

Apologies I actually saw that tweet, horrified

I actually appreciate you coming back to acknowledge your mistake.

you clearly do not understand what he was writing

My first Linux install was the Yggdrasil fall 1994, then took a hiatus (Windows) then moved to Red Hat version something, then Mandrake, then one day discovered Debian (Sarge at that time), liked apt a lot more than rpm and stuck with it. Today I also run Manjaro on laptops and Alpine on smallish things (older stuff, embedded, etc) but my main machine is and will remain Debian: it's the one I'm more familiar with when I need to do something under the hood, and does the job nicely. Happy Birthday!

Someone recently left a comment saying Debian should consider a long-long-LTS of 50 years! I laughed my ass off at such an outrageous idea... but really, Debian is the one organization that could actually pull such a thing off (I suspect, I most likely won't be around long enough to say it was done). They are always first in my annual donations list. Thank you Debian!

Our Debian Linode was created May 2013 and is still going strong, keeping up with upgrades/updates. It's been amazing for stability.

I was converted to Debian 20 years ago and haven't looked back. Props to the maintainers and contributors, thank you.

Debian's policy document [1] lays out various conventions and requirements in unparalleled detail. I haven't seen anything like that in other distros.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

Tried it for the first time 15 years ago and never looked back since then. Coming from Slackware, I remember feeling relieved due to the automatic dependency management.

I just wonder how they will name the release versions when they will run out of Toy Story characters.

Happy birthday and thank you! Debian is one of the greatest pieces of software on Earth.

my favourite GNU/Linux distribution. thank you so much and happy anniversary.

First time I used Debian was 2005 when it was the easiest option I could find to install Linux on a Sun Sparc Station LX with netboot. Still my favorite and my go-to Distro.

I used Debian as a student when I had time to endlessly edit config files. What's the state today? Is it possible to just use it to get work done, say, on a Thinkpad?

Yes, there’s not really any more editing config files than on any other distro.

It's not for everyone but I transitioned to ChromeOS for this exact reason. You still have a debian environment you can work in (run CLI, GUI apps) but the base desktop environment is ChromeOS which "just works" as they say.

What is "work" in this context? Why were you editing config files all the time?

I find Debian very user-friendly, there shouldn't be much config file tinkering, especially if the machine is well supported by Linux. The situation is probably better than a few years ago, but overall I think that's been the case for some time now.

> What is "work" in this context?

I'm primarily interested in 1. having all hardware work out of the box, 2. working suspend to disk/RAM, 3. not having to edit `Xorg.conf`, 4. relatively painless upgrades.

Ubuntu gives me all of that and has served me well for 15 years. But their transition to snap forces me to look for something else.

1 & 2 really depend on what hardware you have. But if you get 1 & 2 today from Ubuntu, I'm willing to bet that you'll get exactly that from Debian as well.

3 hasn't been a thing for a few years now. `Xorg.conf` technically still exists, but the normal display configuration flow doesn't touch it.

4 is better in Debian than it is in Ubuntu, in my opinion. Updates are really painless and well done. But notice that the cycle is different: Ubuntu gives you 6 months release cycles and an LTS every 2 years. Debian gives you a "when it's ready" release cycle with a expected time of 3-4 years, and two rolling releases. That is, "stable" is like a LTS release. If you're running a desktop system, you should probably use "testing", despite the name.

> If you're running a desktop system, you should probably use "testing", despite the name.

I'm not sure I agree, maybe a better compromise is:

* run stable by default

* if at one point there are too many packages that you find outdated and which have a suitable version in testing, upgrade to testing, pinning the distribution name, so that you're back to (the new) stable once it's promoted

Testing changes a lot right after a release, so I find it better to avoid it during that phase if I don't strictly need it. There are also more upgrades in testing and unstable than in stable, and the less upgrades, the less I need to reboot (or at least close my user session) which is a plus.

> Testing changes a lot right after a release

You're right. But, to be honest: my solution to that is to run unstable.

You can try SpiralLinux, that is just Debian with a lot of drivers included: https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=spiral

Not yet updated for Debian 12, though you could upgrade it manually after installing

MX Linux updated to Debian 12 a couple of weeks ago.

If you're comfortable with Linux definitely, I'm using Debian stable both at work (Latitude) and home (Thinkpad) for several years now.

One issue with Debian was the lack of support for proprietary firmware in the stock installer from the Debian web site. A lot of people trying Debian and not aware of this ended up stuck with no WiFi support during installation for example. But this has been fixed, the Debian Bookworm stock disk image includes firmware now.

The Debian default desktop environment seems more polished out of the box than it used to. It's very dumbed-down corporate Gnome non-power-user, but you can just GUI click for your settings, and everything works.

Yes, you can just get work done with it on ThinkPads (both modern ones, and many older ones).

Debian also offers you a few other desktop environment options, some of which will need more tweaking than the default.

Personally, I ignore all of these, and did my config files tweaking atop Xorg and Xmonad, years ago, and keep using mostly the same setup with each major Debian version since then.

(So far, Debian hasn't forced ads onto my start menu, reverted my explicit opt-outs, spied on me, manipulated me against my interests to suit someone else's business or promotion criteria, etc.)

Debian installs perfectly on my Thinkpad x61, and works great out of the box. (x)Ubuntu's installer won't even boot on this hardware.

I have not used any distro except of Debian-like for more than few days. But scare of systemd makes me think about trying other ones, maybe Devuan.

MX Linux is Debian-based but offers sysvinit by default (systemd is optional).

i think mx linux makes the perfect debian desktop. and it's really amazing how many great distros there are based on debian.

happy 30th! happy debianday!

Yeah I hadn't for ages either but have been using RHEL at work for almost a year. It's very annoying because of occasionally missing packages (e.g. `z3`), and just having to figure out different names of packages etc.

However I would have to say that `dnf` (the new `yum`) is waaay better than apt. For a start it is much much faster to install things. I don't know why apt is so slow.

But also it comes with great features to help you deal with very common and tedious Linux admin tasks, like "what package do I install to get this file my program is demanding?" (`dnf provides`) and they have some very nice features like if you run a command and it isn't installed it will offer to install it for you and then run your original command. Someone actually thought about UX for once.

Or if you run a program and it can't find a shared library, it will tell you all the missing libraries, not just the first one. It would be amazing if it also offered to install the right packages but it doesn't quite yet.

So in conclusion I'd stick with Debian given the choice but I sure wish the Apt developers would spend some time using dnf.

> what package do I install to get this file my program is demanding?

You can install apt-file, and then use `apt-file search`.

Ok but why isn't that just part of apt?

> However I would have to say that `dnf` (the new `yum`) is waaay better than apt. For a start it is much much faster to install things. I don't know why apt is so slow.

I (and everyone else I know of) have the opposite experience, which pretty much matches the numbers here: <https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-linux-package...>. DNF seems to be 0.1% faster than YUM, but it’s still not competitive with other package managers.

Yeah it's because its metadata update is automatic and stupidly slow and he's only installing one package so that dominates. When you're installing 100 packages it's a lot faster though.

But it is quite annoying - I wish the update were faster.

There are a couple changes coming that will help

1) zstd compressed metadata. Currently almost all repos use gzip, but zstd works better. All the software support is in place it just needs to be used, and Fedora will likely be turning out on soon.

2) dnf5 will do a better job of parallelizing metadata downloads. Currently it happens one repo at a time.

3) dnf5 will avoid downloading file lists.xml when it's not needed, which is a big help because that file tends to be the largest one

Hopefully then it will be faster than apt without any asterisks

That sounds great. Why use XML in the first place though? Strange design.

> scare of systemd

Really? After 10 years of using distros with systemd, you'd consider switching because you're "scared" of it?

How am I supposed to get scared of systemd without 10 years of using Linux distros? If I am comfortable without using MS/Apple/Google software then systemd is the last barrier between me and freedom.

We have all of our dev and production servers running on Debian without systemd as init. systemd helper packages are still installed.

It's more difficult in desktop installs.

Debian stable + Flatpaks is the most stable Linux experience I've worked with. Thanks to everyone involved in the project.

I started with Debian 3, a while ago. Still my distro of choice.

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Debian 12 is essentially Ubuntu 22.10 LTS. If you use LTS versions of Ubuntu, Debian is about same thing.

Debian and Ubuntu have similarities, but keep in mind - Ubuntu is derived from Debian, not the other way around. However, they differ in areas like release cycles, package management, and default configurations.

What you just said is such a well known truism, so it is actually rude to imply that someone on HN would not know that. My point was, however, is from the users point of view Bookworm is very very similar to 22.10 however it is an lts, so for those who want to switch from Ubuntu, this is the experience they should expect.

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