This is a good day for Free Software. The city of Munich is finally making its migration to Linux official, and they will be using Debian (translation). They were going to use SUSE, back when it was still a German company.
The announcement happened a few days after the election of Branden Robinson as the new DPL. I hope things change in Debian soon. The current stable version of Debian was released in July 2002. That can be ok for a server, but as a desktop computer it means extremely old software. That’s why most Debian desktop users use the “unstable” version of Debian: sid. Don’t be fooled by the “unstable” tag, it is more stable than the most popular distros out there.
Still, the future is unclear. I am a big supporter of Debian, but nothing is perfect. The Debian organization is extremely vertical and bureucratic. It seems that sarge will never be released. And there is the rise of the Debian based Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is, IMHO, the best “final user” linux distro out there right now. There are several Debian Developers working in Canonical (Ubuntu’s sponsor), and they basically fork Debian unstable, put the most recent GNOME desktop in it, and release. And they DO release. And best of all, they release OFTEN. This is the complete opposite of Debian. Probably the only thing Ubuntu lacks is some kind of distro-control-panel-for-the-linux-newbie, like SUSE’s Yast2, Mandrake’s DrakConf or RedHat’s redhat-config-* suite.
There has been a lot of noise from some of the most fanatical DDs. They don’t like Ubuntu. Even Ian Murdock (Debian’s father) had something to say. They fail to see that if Debian had a sane release cycle, Ubuntu would never have been the smashing success it is right now. It’s kinda like Minix/Linux in a small scale, Minix was there already, but Linux “won” the market.
Another personal gripe with Debian is the lack of some form of “official” corporate support, specially a Debian Professional Certification or something like that. I know there are lots of business out there offering Debian support, but still, some form of cert would be nice to see. Note that I am not a strong believer in certs (this belongs to another post), but a Debian certification would really give a big boost to Debian in the Enterprise World. Sadly, most Debian developers don’t even care about the corporate market.
But even with these minor gripes, I use Debian as a desktop (unstable of course). I think it is, on the technical side, the most solid distribution right now. And when used as a server, it is a pleasure to administer, thanks to the Debian Policy. My complaints with Debian have nothing to do with Debian as a distribution, but with Debian as an organization.
I hope Branden can improve some things now, specially because he signed the Vancouver Release Team Meeting. One of the consequences of this meeting would be that Debian will abandon most minor architecture from stable, focusing on i386, powerpc, ia64 and amd64. Other architectures will still be supported, but they won’t cause delays in Debian stable releases anymore, which is a Good Thing for the vast majority of Debian users.
Comments (3)
I agree with this post. The reason why Ubuntu exists is because of the slow release cycle and the human bloat that has become of the release team and the management of Debian. The vertical bureaucracy is to blame for Ubuntu and the fragmentation that it has caused. That being said, Ubuntu is now the best Debian for the desktop. I myself have not installed it because there are not as many packages available for it as there are for Debian. This, however, can change. Furthermore, a normal desktop user might not need much beyond web/email/IM anyway, so this issue is not even relevant for Ubuntu’s target audience.
Ubuntu is a good response to Debian’s shitty management.
I only ask ¿why ubuntu don´t provide packages compatible with debian?. I read the Ian’s Murdock Post and i agree with him in that the debian-based distros have to keep compatibily between themself.
Ubuntu is in this moment (in my opinion) one of the better distros for end-users, but i certainly mistrust ubuntu because it´s owned by a company, I´m not a zealot but I remember Red Hat and their good distro (and everyone remembers that) now changed in Fedora.
I think that all of we have to beware about ubuntu, personally I will still using debian, but yes, debian is slow adding new packages, i use unstable as desktop and when i look ubuntu i found utilities that didn´t come with gnome package in sarge, plz!, it is unstable, put in it the packages!!.
gramarr error!!! it should be “¿why ubuntu doesn´t provide packages”. Apologizes.