Happy 20th birthday Debian

And you know what comes next after Arch...

...Gentoo.

Debian to Arch in, no kidding, one day. I barely even knew what happened to me. I almost felt bad about it which is why I try to keep up on what's going on in Debian-land, but I was just setting up some VMs and thought I'd see what pacman was like and then [...]

If you want things done slow and right, use Debian. Part of being a highly fragemented market (which the Linux desktop is) is that each distribution needs to find its own niche. Debian has the slow and stable niche pretty well covered. Ubuntu's distinguishing factor is that it is more cutting edge, and has more personality to it. Simmilarly, Fedora also states on its about page that its goal is to stay cutting edge at the cost of stability.

Remember that Fedora functions in part as RedHat-testing (to use Debian nomenclature), which both explains and justifies why they do many of the things they do.

I haven't tried it, but probably. Ubuntu is essentially Debian, especially at a low level. Also, the Steam license explicitly allows for third parties to repackage it to work on other platforms. In the event that their is an actual incompatibility, you can always have two versions of whatever dependency installed on the system.

Yes, I run it on Debian testing (with multiarch packages). I installed it through dpkg without a problem.

It's available in Debian's sid/non-free repositories, so yes.

Speaking for Docker: it's true that we've only released packages for Ubuntu, but we've been working on a Debian package as well. Starting in 0.6 we expect to offer both in parity.

On a practical note, we are forced to maintain these 2 packages separately if only because Ubuntu uses upstart and Debian doesn't.

Re: network effects of Ubuntu dependencies. In our case that was not a factor, since Docker is a static binary built in Go, and all distros are equally hapless in their management of that. In fact, we are divorcing ourselves completely from distro-specific dependency management. As of this week, docker packages are built by us in an environment we control, not the distro build farms (hint: we build docker with docker). Then we wrap it with fpm and call it a day. Separately, we are working with downstream maintainers of each distro to help them package docker in a policy-compliant way. But those are 2 completely separate tracks.

Grab the source packages from Ubuntu and build debs with debuild (see the man page). Most of the time, the build dependencies match up well (the dependencies for the Ubuntu-built debs don't). With pbuilder and friends it's also easy to set up your own PPA-like infrastructure.

http://forums.debian.net/ is one forum.

I'm not sure if it is actually a part of the Debian project or just something that grew alongside. Can be useful sometimes, but if your present channels work for you then I'd suggest you might want to do without the 'noise'[1]

[1] http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=106389

PS: never ceases to amaze me that you can download an iso, boot a computer, install an operating system and application software, and do stuff just when you want to without upfront cost (other than time). Debian is a large part of that history isn't it?

I spent about a week downloading perhaps 7 CDs for Woody (I guess it would have been 2002). I'm fairly sure I never actually installed packages from most of the CDs.

I shyed away from Debian initially, as I had a bad experience with Knoppix on my hardware (though it did pique my interest.) However I do remember that Fedora Core 3 came on 4 CDs though. That was the very early 2000s.

I still remember when Fedora moved to DVDs. I was quite frustrated because I didn't have a DVD burner at the time. Almost 13 years later and my distro of choice fits on a single CD-R; I guess I've come full circle.

I think potato was six CDs.

You were lucky.

I had to install my first Debian hit (1.1 / buzz) via recycled floppies downloaded over a 33.6k dialup.

There is not a single time at my life since where I haven't had a Debian installation somewhere since (currently have 46 machines running it at my command).

I started out with... Rex I think. Or maybe Buzz? I kept the CD's out of nostalgia for a while, but may have finally got rid of them. I liked it so much that, despite not having a lot of skills, I signed up to help, and packaged up a few things. Debian was an awesome learning experience, and a great "escalator" in that I came in with not a lot of knowledge, and by the time I left, knew a whole lot more about a variety of things. I know I'm not the only one for whom it was such a formative experience.

My first Linux experience was downloading Slackware over a slow modem line (I want to say 14.4, but it was a while ago) onto floppies.

The first Debian "release" I installed was called "Slink-and-a-half." It was Slink with some important Potato packages backported by VA Linux.

I quickly upgraded it using dist-upgrade to unstable, which was potato at the time (testing didn't exist yet).

What do you like about Debian servers of Ubuntu server? I have always used Ubuntu for all my servers and never bothered looking at debian for that.

The big reason I chose Ubuntu and just ran with it is support and security updates. Ubuntu LTS, I believe still, is supported for much longer than Debian is.

Ubuntu's stated focus from the outset is making an enduser distro. Their success in mindshare made them popular in the server arena, but there are little things here and there where it falls behind. Making a server not based on an LTS version is one early trap to fall into (all debian versions are effectively LTS), but more importantly, debian is not fond of retrograde breakages. Ubuntu is much more of a moving target than debian - when you want to find out how to do something, it often changes between releases (one mildly common desktop task (which I can't recall at the moment :/ ) had five different ways to do it over the past five releases...). There's more unique stuff in ubuntu - like upstart, a core feature which no-one else uses - and that reduces your troubleshooting info pool. Ubuntu also has lots of automagic-helpery stuff, which is good for an end-user distro, but gets in the way a little on a server. One example is the 'did you mean?' thing when you make a shell typo. That consumes time and is pointless on a server.

I'm not particularly familiar with CentOS. I've been an apt user since rediscovering linux, and every time I venture onto an rpm-based system, yum just spews hard-to-read crap at me. It feels like rearranging deck chairs, so I head back to what I know.

Same here. Although I can't call it hacking. I lived in the middle of nowhere (tech wise, 30k people town in Lithuania) and somehow I found a book (probably the only one about Linux in my native language at that time) about Mandriva with a CD attached to it. Have no idea what that book was doing there in the local book store. Usually it were a dozen of random IT books and they had 1-2 copies of each. After a couple of tries, I installed it. Didn't have any clue what I was doing (I just heard that Linux was a cool thing) but that's how it's started... :)