Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2007 11:25 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

"Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu"

Any quantitative basis to that claim?

For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

For Developers... it's not so easy to compare them: a lot of developers are both Debian and Ubuntu developers, patches are flying both ways, so it's not easy to say if developers "deserted the distro"...

I once moved from Debian Sarge to Ubuntu. It lasted 5 hours. After being unable to configure my laptop properly, I moved back to vanilla Debian and fixed my wireless in 5 min. And I am a user, not a developer.

It's typical story, actually: when seasoned Debian user moves to Ubuntu s/he usually expect for everything to be perfect: no fiddling with files, everything is autodetected and autoconfigured, etc. And when he founds that s/he still need to fiddle with configuration files and fix stupid bugs - he loudly blames Ubunty as "just another overhyped distribution" and goes back to Debian (as you can see only half of Debian users deserted the distro not 90%).

Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is significally more polished then Debian, but it's still far from being the ideal distribution...

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2007 14:07 UTC (Sat) by BeS (subscriber, #43108) [Link]

>For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

This is just a search statistic. Does it really mean that people switching to Ubuntu? It could also mean that people has the most problems with Ubuntu and therefore Ubuntu has the highest search quota. I think there are many possibilities to interpret this statistic but it doesn't show that users switching to Ubuntu.

Not so easy

Posted Apr 14, 2007 16:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

The graph does not show the scale, so it is not so easy to discern anything beyond a general trend. Is the scale logarithmic, where is the zero?

Anyway, I see not so much a decline of existing users as a new population entering Linux. True, there is a slight decrease for all the others, but the cumulative result seems to be going up. However, according to this Linux is in decline itself. Go figure.

Not so easy

Posted Apr 14, 2007 21:24 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The graph does not show the scale, so it is not so easy to discern anything beyond a general trend.

Is the scale logarithmic, where is the zero?

It was the goal, I think. That's where "trends" in name comes from. Scale is not logarithmic (easy to see if you'll try queries with different popularities), but number of queries is "per million requests" (or something like this).

However, according to this Linux is in decline itself. Go figure.

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic. This means most internet citizens don't care about Linux - there are a lot of things to search: PSP, Wii, MySpace and so on...

Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic.

Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:47 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

May be. Search traffic is growing, Linux/Ubuntu/Debian searches are probably all growing too - but can we be sure that means number of users is growing too ? Nope: we need outside data. We do know that people were switching to Google in this period, we probably are using search engines more often today then we did yesterday, etc. That's why absolute values will give us more info about Google then they will give us info about Linux/Ubuntu/Debian... Relative values are quite reliable - unless masochistic Ubuntu users do 10 times more searches while trying to fix endless problems... Possible but highly unlikely...

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 16, 2007 4:56 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> Ubuntu is significally more polished then Debian

I recently migrated a computer from Dapper to Etch, and I much prefer Etch. Ubuntu's habit of changing KDE is very annoying.

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 24, 2007 19:44 UTC (Tue) by johnwin (subscriber, #4711) [Link]

> Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is significally more polished then
> Debian, but it's still far from being the ideal distribution...

IME the opposite is true; Ubuntu is significantly *less* polished than Debian, at least than Debian Etch anyway.

I used Ubuntu for a while, when Etch was still a fair way from release and I wanted the newer desktop etc. I got those but I also got buggy packages, a kernel build process which produces an un-bootable kernel and other irritants. It's not that Ubuntu is bad, but it doesn't have that ultimate polish which Debian's pathological testing gives it.

As soon as I realised that Etch provided both a stable environment *and* all the new packages which I wanted I switched back.

Currently my wife's laptop still runs Ubuntu. It's a persistent slight irritant that it isn't so polished and reliable as Etch, but not quite enough to get me to upgrade it.

John

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 2:22 UTC (Mon) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

For much of its history, Debian has been the major noncommercial, philosophically free distribution.

Huh? For all its history, unless he's counting the startup period before it became a major distro. Ubuntu may be major, but it edges toward commercial, and is certainly not philosophically free.

[D]oes Debian have a purpose any more?

So long as some consider Free Software merely a way to write better code, Debian has a purpose.

Debian [...] leaves out the Win32 codecs that would allow users to play several standard video formats.

I assume he means the ones that are patented—the non-free ones.

You may find the [Firefox] name change pointless if you aren't in sympathy with the Debian community's philosophy

Or if you aren't in sympathy with immediate security updates.

Rumors of Debian's decline or irrelevance have been circulating for some time.

And, given this article, it seems that Mr. Byfield is one of the engines driving said rumors.

Debian may just have found a new purpose -- and, with it, a guarantee of its survival.

Feh. It needs no new purpose; so long as there are developers who believe in truly free Free Software, it will flourish.

However, aside from the ``the sky isn't really falling'' content, this is a decent review.

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 4:48 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> Ubuntu may be major, but it edges toward commercial, and is certainly not philosophically free.

Ubuntu's "main" component is as philosophically free as Debian's "main" component. See here.

> > Debian [...] leaves out the Win32 codecs that would allow users to play several standard video formats.

> I assume he means the ones that are patented—the non-free ones.

Both Debian and Ubuntu include patent-encumbered codecs and other software; if all patent-encumbered software was excluded, there would be almost nothing left.

Because he said "Win32 codecs", he probably meant things like the "Binary Codec Packages" here. If so, then he's incorrect, because Ubuntu doesn't include those either.

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 5:08 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> If so, then he's incorrect, because Ubuntu doesn't include those either.

Correction: Actually, he didn't say that Ubuntu includes Win32 codecs.

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 22:29 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> Ubuntu's "main" component is as philosophically free as Debian's "main" component. See here.

Only in statement. Ubuntu includes lots of stuff that are non-free by Debian standard (pristine firefox/thunderbird, GFDL+Invariant section docs, CC BY-SA , some firmware, etc.), so either Ubuntu is less serious about its commitment or Ubuntu freedom philosophy is different from Debian.

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 10:22 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Huh? For all its history, unless he's counting the startup period before it became a major distro. Ubuntu may be major, but it edges toward commercial, and is certainly not philosophically free.

Commercial != proprietary

There is no conflict in having commercial Free software. Ubuntu is definately a commercial distribution. As commercial as Redhat or anything else, but that's not a bad thing.

Debian is about the only large distribution that is ran by a non-profit community. This gives it a unique position compared to other popular Linux distributions and it's interesting how it comes out.

> I assume he means the ones that are patented—the non-free ones.

Not to also mention the copyright violations. He is talking about the _win32_ codecs, ( ...leaves out the Win32 codecs... ) which were never intended by their makers to be used in Linux and I expect that many of them have licenses that would forbid modification and redistribution (not that I actually looked that stuff personally).

I don't think there is any distribution that provides the windows codecs stuff, is there?

...
...

My two cents:

Debian would be a lot more popular if they could get releases out on time. Not everybody wants to deal with > 300 megs worth of updates per month in Unstable and fixing stuff every time they update. They don't have the nessicary skills to deal with the schitzphrenic nature of Testing.

I think that if the new Debian president is able to pull off his idea of desktop upgrades for stable every six months then that will go a LONG way to making Debian usefull for mortals.

Just upgrade the kernel, X, KDE, and Gnome and the popular desktop applications (everybody does the popularity contest, right? :P ) to the latest release would be all you'd need. Leave GCC and other such messes for major stable upgrades. I think that would totally kick-ass.

There realy is a great deal of interest in Debian. It's a significant acheivement right now and people realy have a desire to use it, but it's just unreliable when it comes to releasing software and that has a huge cooling effect on the overall community.

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 19:02 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

The problem is, I don't think that's the order of difficulty. GCC should be easy; in practice, there will be a few bugs in GCC or the compiled programs that will be discovered, but most of the major C++ difficulties are in the past. X is so old that most of the compatibility issues are in the past, but the massive rearrangements it has gone through have been unsettling. But GNOME and KDE have such large dependencies that any changes to them can force a huge number of programs on the system to recompile and link to new versions of the libraries.