The Debian Experience

I first got acquainted with Debian by using Sarge. It was okay, and I got comfortable with apt and all the other unique things. Etch was truly excellent. I still love it, especially on older hardware.

Lenny stunk. I tried it a half-dozen ways, and it always stunk. I thought that was the end for me. I played with Ubuntu, which was okay. I loved Kanotix back when it was based on Sarge, then Etch, but it stalled somewhere back there and I lost interest. I tested a few other derivatives, but never found anything I could tolerate.

Then I tested Squeeze recently. I’m in love again. I still can’t forget the nasty experience with Lenny, but I don’t have to go back there. Squeeze is the good stuff.

For those who amuse themselves watching me test all these various operating systems, let me tell you this: When it comes down to the looming economic collapse, a lot of Linux distributions will die. Some will die for other reasons. For example, I’m pretty sure whatever Canonical does to Ubuntu is going to kill it for a lot of folks. Barring some great surprise, their user numbers will plummet soon. Red Hat may survive, and I’m pretty sure Scientific Linux will survive, as will CentOS, so long as Red Hat remains economically viable. Fedora is just a play ground, just a hobby, a toy. It produces nice things for Red Hat, but it’s just a toy. Those who play with such toys do dominate the entire Linux community, so that’s not a slam. But they depend entirely on Red Hat’s support system. I’m not sure how much longer SUSE will stay alive, either. SUSE was once my home distro, the one I always trusted, so I don’t hate SUSE for the deal with Microsoft. But SUSE has suffered much under the big corporate flags, and I’ve not been able to use it since about 8.2. If it doesn’t revive and put out good product, it’s going to die.

But when all the others die for one reason or another, Debian will still be around as long as there are computers. It’s about the only one which has no commercial sponsor, so it’s not dependent on economics in that sense. It’s got one of the largest developer communities, and probably the largest user community, too. For all their stickiness about purity of the Open Source philosophy, they have one of the easiest routes for breaking those rules. They don’t include the proprietary code with their distribution, but you can download and install just about anything with their own Debian tools, and it works better than any system I’ve tried. Better than Ubuntu, too.

If you are looking for something to survive tough times and a mass of great unknowns, I recommend you start investing the effort to get to know Debian.