I wonder if it was influenced by the fact that apt-get was much more mature than yum/whatever, at the beginning of mass broadband age. Before that, RedHat and RPM almost got rid of Debian.
Compare Debian to Fedora. Fedora there are multiple releases per year. Debian you have the protection of being in the herd for a good 2 years. Each release is a much more known quality and it is easier to find bugs and documentation for whatever it is that got broken in Bookworm. Investing in workarounds makes more sense because it won't be fixed in 6 months. Etc.
Only software project I know where it seems likely that moving slow is a positive. But slow seems to work well for Debian.
As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them.
EDIT Also, woah! Anticipating something like this sort of manoeuvre is a good reason to have avoided RHEL. Corporations. Not long term bastions of freedom.
"However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public. The code is still available to Red Hat customers, as well as developers using free accounts, though under conditions that forbid redistribution of the source code." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux
As a Fedora user, I like that someone pays for Fedora development, which (hopefully?) enforces standards in terms of code quality and QA, but also things like workplace policies etc. (e.g. I couldn't use software whose staff has been alleging sexual assault).
I think the only non-corporate distro I'd use is Arch (which I did for a while, but Fedora is just so easy to use!)
I should give Debian a try though for sure.
That's not actually true, it's just not being provided in such a way as to be trivially rebuildable. CentOS Stream is the upstream for RHEL and as such you can reconstruct RHEL from CentOS Stream [1], it just requires more effort to track the correct package versions.
[1] yes, I'm aware that has broken on occasion, almost exclusively for EL8 where the upstream / downstream process wasn't fully developed yet
* Red Hat Linux (previously the go-to desktop linux) was discontinued in favour of RHEL/Fedora in ~2003.
* Ubuntu was first released in 2004.
* Around 2000 a new release would come as a CD image and the normal way of upgrading was to wipe out everything except your home directory. This meant trying out a new distro was pretty much as easy as upgrading your existing one.
* As you say, although Yum was released in 2002, apt-get had been around since 1998, and so at that time was more mature.
* Wifi became increasingly common, and almost always needed proprietary binary blobs. Proprietary ATI and nvidia linux drivers became available. And of course MP3 was widespread.
Ubuntu arrived at an opportune moment - former Red Hat users looking for a new home, users used to wiping their system and installing a new distro, and clear benefits if wifi, graphics and MP3 all work out the box.
Consider a comparable quote:
> Taskrabbit is an ancient Swedish word meaning "I can't assemble IKEA furniture".
Years later, I figured out that you're supposed to use the spacebar to select/toggle UI elements, not the Enter key. Nobody told me that, and the text-mode installer certainly doesn't tell you!
Ubuntu 11.04, on the other hand, was no trouble to install.
> Ubuntu is an ancient african word, meaning "I can't configure Debian" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ubuntu
For some organizations there is benefit to continuously improving their platform engineering, but for many, technology is a tool that's required to do something else. They don't want to keep up with changes, and sometimes the changes aren't useful for them. On HackerNews most of the content and users are technology focused, but in the real world its the opposite. There is a reason why many enterprise organizations still run stuff on mainframes as an example. It's not because they want to, many have even spend hundreds of millions trying to exit, but the thing that's the most important is the stability to their core business. Now I don't want you to get the impression that I'm drawing a comparison between Debian and mainframes, my point is simply that to many organizations the ability to provide a stable support the core purpose of the organization is more important than anything else. Debian does that.
It's a bit like the old Photoshop strategy, you let them pirate the software when young to hook them up, and then they would demand it professionally.
Ubuntu was always easier on the server with root user disabled by default and unattended-upgrades did its job without a hassle with newer packages. (It meant quite different if it was PHP 5 or 7.)
From the time I started to mess around with Linux, around 96-98, the biggest distros were certainly Slackware, Debian and Red Hat.
Slack you basically had to compile and config everything from scratch.
RH helped a bit with packaged software in RPM format but dependency management was missing. Basically a glorified tar ball.
apt solved the distribution and packaging of software.
I still prefer .deb packages so now I'm looking at jumping ship, probably to MX Linux as Ubuntu is using more and more snaps and so far they've just caused me problems; I also have philosophical objections (not necessarily well-founded in logic!) against monolithic packages.
Not sure why I started that reply, ... get off my lawn!
And any update would change the conflicts, to the point in that updating it simply wasn't a thing.
But technically, rpm was way more complete then dpkg. This changed with apt-get, as it took many years to the RPM distros to create yum.
And regarding the speed, which is what most people mention online when they compare the two, it's only faster because apt-get update is a separate step.
Around 2003, Yum was a Python tool which took ages just to build dependency graph to do basic things.
yum/dnf rollback is unreliable even today because the previously installed versions of packages might no longer be present in the repos.
I love Fedora, but DNF has atrocious UX.
I haven't run Linux on my local machines for a couple years though, so maybe things have changed a bit, but if we're talking about the years where Debian gained "market" (mind?) share, then these are the reasons IMHO.
Wikipedia says yum wasn’t even a thing until 2002.