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Wed, 09 Dec 2009

A big machine that nothing can stop

A couple of weeks ago, Lucas Nussbaum wrote about his experience at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Two things stuck out at me:

In the summer of 2004, my laptop (an iBook G4) ran Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC. I tried out Ubuntu that autumn, and was very impressed. It's been five years since then. My desktop still runs Debian, and I'm proud to be a "two-distro" community member.

At the same time, this juggernaut nature raises concern. When Ubuntu releases ship with significant flaws, I quietly sigh and wonder, Are we doing good service to the people coming to GNU/Linux for the first time and seeing Ubuntu? This bugginess has bit me a few times (even for upgrades between one release and the next), and it pushed a friend of mine to switch a lot of his computing to DragonflyBSD.

Lucas points out that Ubuntu's done a fantastic job of becoming visible. A look at Google Trends shows that people search for "Ubuntu" about as much as they search for "Linux" at all.

Richard Stallman complains when people refer to GNU/Linux as just "Linux." But today, the most popular name for an operating system based on GNU is probably "Ubuntu." For Stallman, having his hard work associated with someone else's "Linux" project must be frustrating. As a Debian contributor, it would be easy to succumb to the same feeling with regard to Ubuntu.

Lucas is well aware of that. He asks,

Debian does have users! I was feeling a bit disheartened about my maintenance work on alpine lately, when out of the blue I received an email from a fellow at MIT asking me if I would accept some help with maintenance from him. Just seeing the note was a relief; it's very nice to be reminded that I have users to take care of.

Debian is not as popular as Ubuntu on the desktop (or laptop), it's true. But technically sharp people do frequently still choose it. For example, the FreeNAS project recently announced a switch from FreeBSD to Debian (and a new name as coreNAS).

But we could end up a "package supermarket". To stave this off, we must do good releases and make sure people know about them. Doing all that work takes us all time. We must recruit new contributors, help them find things to work on, and make sure they feel welcome. And sometimes-sloppy maintainers like me ought to fix our packages, and get help from others where necessary.

I promise to work toward that.

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The main goal of Ubuntu is to reach as much people as it can, that's great for people facing to the GNU/Linux world, but probably some skilled user may find debian more appealing. In particular debian has got some really strong policies (I like those :) that well shows the points of strength.
Making a distro than nobody uses doesn't make any sense (or maybe would?) but market share isn't the only measure of the greatness of a distribution.

Posted by charon at Wed Dec 9 18:25:01 2009

As long as Debian remains Debian it will be the best GNU/Linux distribution for knowledgeable users. I worry about the release cycle proposals and other things that tend to make Debian more like Ubuntu. It is not the quality that is attracting people to Ubuntu, but it is the quality that causes some of them to move to Debian.

Posted by Francis at Wed Dec 9 22:48:49 2009

Hi Asheesh,

Just two clarifications:
"Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop." => this refers to the internal organization of Ubuntu development (I'm not saying that it doesn't apply to the distro as well, but that wasn't my point).

"Debian does have users!" => Of course (note "without many users" vs "without users"). I'm just saying that it doesn't have as many users as Ubuntu, probably by several orders of magnitude.

(I agree with the rest of your points)

Posted by Lucas at Thu Dec 10 01:12:34 2009

Dear Asheesh,

interesting graph on Google Trands… I played a bit further with it and found a very impressive correlation between Debian and Fedora: http://www.google.com/trends?q=debian,fedora

Maybe what we interpret as a decline of Debian compared to Ubuntu is actually part of a broader trend, in which Debian and Fedora have much more in common than Debian and Ubuntu?

Posted by Charles Plessy at Thu Dec 10 04:24:44 2009

Debian is still the distribution for the people who know the difference between windows and linux ;-).

Posted by kero at Thu Dec 10 05:36:24 2009

Ubuntu must be doing something right. Ubuntu users are not clueless. Giving up Windows is hard because you have to learn a lot of things. the fact that so many people stay with XP proves that most people value stablity and consistency over performance, functionality and fun, when it comes to computing. Ubuntu users are adventurous and motivated in some important way to try something new. It's ridiculous and insulting, to say they don't know the difference between Ubuntu and Windows. Debian doesn't need to be defensive. Ubuntu is doing something different. And it wins consistently good reviews, growing buzz and growing adoption, so it is doing it well.

But is Debian does a lot of things right too. The community is more advanced and software quality is given a higher priority. I've come to think of Debian Developers as Jedi knights: it's bloody amazing what they do. Personally, I've tried a number of Ubuntu distributions but every time I run into a problem I find seriously annoying, which is never going to be fixed until the next release, where I've learnt that this time it's the other end of the sausage which is not cooked. I also came to the conclusion that Gnome was a source of many problems for Ubuntu.

But for the huge numbers of Ubuntu users, it offers a great entry to a good operating system, still using free software. While I don't use Ubuntu I've found the forums and documentation helpful on many occasions. The paper cut projects are fantastic.

For me, sidux is a great solution. It's fresher than Ubuntu or Fedora, and it has a community and documentation to make it work. Of course, this is sid with lots of updates so not for non-enthusiast use. But if I had to choose between Debian stable and Ubuntu for my laptop, it would seriously be a difficult choice. In the end I think I'd go for Ubuntu and make it work properly. Debian testing, which you'd think would be a contender for desktop users, doesn't grab me because it gets a lot of bugs and they often take a long time to propogate from sid. It seems to end up as the worse of both worlds.

Posted by Tim at Thu Dec 10 07:11:32 2009

When someone asks me which Linux distribution to choose, I will always tell him to use Ubuntu. You get very new software, good hardware support with an easy administration. This is certainly nice for home users. They don't mind doing an upgrade every 6 months. However, when the concerns are about stability and maintenance, I would rather choose Debian, as bleeding edge software and hardware support for the latest video card isn't that much of a priority in that case.

I would not use Debian on a computer at home mainly because I want the latest software/crack even if my system can (and probably will) break. I'm willing to take the chance, it still is a lot of fun to fix some problems and try out different configurations when the new video driver promises to fix all of them. But I'm only speaking for myself here.

The summary is clear: When you want the latest stuff basically working, you don't choose Debian for reasons mentioned before. If your concerns are stability and an easy maintenance, then Debian is, also in my eyes, certainly the better choice. But honestly: How many people prefer maintenance over new crack at home? For people coming from windows, Ubuntu certainly is an improvement.

I also agree, Debian has its users and honestly, I would not be feeling well, having Ubuntu on my servers. I don't know why, I trust Debian more in this case.

Posted by Martin at Thu Dec 10 08:12:04 2009

As an Ubuntu developer on the Kubuntu side, I am here to say Debian will be around forever. Look at it, 2 of the oldest Linux distros are still very much relevant today, Slackware and Debian. Both fill a niche that Ubuntu isn't hitting on. To this day, my 2 favorite distros are Slackware and Debian. I cut my teeth on Slackware first around 1994, and then within the next year or so Debian. Debian was the first project I contributed to almost 15 years ago. As a KDE developer, I do 95% of my work in Debian for upstream, and I am a Sid junkie :)

Keep up the great work Asheesh, and while you are wearing your community hats, lets all work together to strengthen any and all relationships. Have a great day!

Posted by nixternal at Thu Dec 10 10:39:35 2009

Huh im not a computer professionalist in any kind, im can't write script or something similar. Im only common user of Linux. im use Debian on my laptop and desktop. And my wife too. I don't understand what Debian is not for desktops or laptops. BTW on laptop im switch from Ubuntu to Debian :)

Posted by Zloty at Thu Dec 10 13:43:04 2009

I use Debian testing on my server and it's been great.  I had no idea you were the alpine maintainer.  Most of my users use alpine.  A thousand thank yous for that work!

Posted by will kahn-greene at Thu Dec 10 13:51:24 2009

Debian installation is still too confusing mostly the process of getting the installation media. Until Debian.org makes a stab at your hardware, and offers suitable images that "just work", and suitable instructions to make them work, the average Joe is presented with "[amd64][i386][ia64][powerpc][s390]" (I know what they are roughly, but then I've worked on s390 systems) and when he picks the right option is dumped in an FTP folder, where as Ubuntu you click the obvious link, you get a (1) Download (2) Burn CD (3) Install Ubuntu with instructions.

I tried Ubuntu early on, found they had badly broken key libraries, and hadn't tested DVD playing as a use case. I don't think things have changed that much, but for many folks these kind of instabilities are still light years ahead of the old Windows version on their PC (Windows XP or earlier).

Anyone asking why Ubuntu has more users hasn't even pretended to be a new user when doing a Debian install. Or they skipped straight to the CD they already had. Pretend you are clueless about Debian, visit Debian.org and try and find out how to get started. It is painful, it is bad enough when you have a fair clue.

Also Ubuntu do a better job with non-free (Nvidia/Flash/Java whatever). In the Nvidia case the actual technical stuff is similar but the Debian Wiki was several releases (In debian time scales that is bad!) out of date on the topic last time I looked, so the user will never find out what they need to know. If I had an Nvidia card I'd fix the wiki page. Again Debian's problems here are generally documentation and presentation not technical. It was a long time before I discovered the packages to do these things the Debian way, rather than downloading from non-free vendor website.

But I think the biggy is still getting to the point where you have a bootable CD or USB key that will successfully install Debian. Without making that step as easy as possible everything else is irrelevant for that would-be Debian user.

Posted by Simon at Thu Dec 10 17:34:58 2009

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