Other reasons [LWN.net]

Other reasons

Posted Feb 4, 2008 10:16 UTC (Mon) by hensema (guest, #980)
Parent article: Why companies don't support Debian (LinuxWatch)

The Linux-Watch author may be wrong in some points, he completely missed some others, IMHO:

* From a business perspective, a Debian installation is hard to support.

This has two main reasons: first, it's extremely hard to define 'a Debian install'. Because of
the complete freedom to the user, you'd have to do a lot of investigation to ascertain what
configuration actually is installed. Second, Debian systems tend to be more customized (less
standardized) than other installations of other distro's.

* No release cycle.

Corporations like predictability. Debian releases seem to happen randomly.

* However, one thing is certain: slow release cycle.

You may not know when Debian is going to release, but you can be certain of one thing: the
release cycle is slooooowwww. This either forces you to run a development release (testing or
unstable) or at the very least compile some custom software yourself (the kernel comes to
mind).
Please note almost all distributions make a development version of their distro available.
Think Rawhide, think Opensuse factory. Most users of thos e distributions don't need to use
the development versions, while lots of Debian users seem to run testing or even unstable.
While you may argue testing is 'good enough' for most purposes, you really only want to run a
stable distribution in a business environment.

* Conservative

Debian is created from a very conservative standpoint. The base system is guaranteed to run on
very modest hardware. While this is a good thing, businesses won't care. Their hardware will
almost never be older than 4 years.
This wouldn't be too bad if this wouldn't affect Debian on modern hardware. But it does. When
a developer assumes his software is going to run on moderately modern hardware, he can offload
the user and take his workload on the computer, for instance by creating a more efficient (to
the user!) interface to the software.
Even without user interaction, you still have to deal with a fundamentally different
environment in contemporary hardware.

* Freedom without compromises

From a political point of view, Debian is completely right: Be Free!

However, when this harms business on the short term, principles tend to be thrown out of the
window very quickly. So they want their driver right now, and bug free. Not alpha 0.6 of some
Free reverse engineered driver, which may reach stability in another 6 months. Or so.

Debian is a very good distribution, for its purpose. But its purpose isn't to be used in a
corporate environment. It's developed to cater it's developer's needs, and none other. This
makes Debian an excellent distribution for developers (eg the audience of this site), and an
excellent basis for more business-like distributions like Ubuntu.

I think this kind of specialization is a good thing. It makes software ideally suited for its
purpose. A very broad, generic Linux distribution essentially would be good at nothing, it
would just not suck in almost all areas.

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Other reasons

Posted Feb 4, 2008 14:59 UTC (Mon) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

>first, it's extremely hard to define 'a Debian install'.

In my opinion it isn't. Every combination of software that is in a distributions 'main' is a
valid Debian install.

>Second, Debian systems tend to be more customized (less standardized) than other
installations of other distro's.

Almost all software debian distributes comes with proper 'out of the box' defaults. Anything
less standardized is put there explicitly.

> the release cycle is slooooowwww. 

It's just about adequate for corporate use I'd say . When stuff works, you really don't want
to touch it anymore. Debian "Stable" actually means "no regressions"; there's a reason for
that.

>Debian is created from a very conservative standpoint. The base system is guaranteed to run
on very modest hardware. While this is a good thing, businesses won't care. Their hardware
will almost never be older than 4 years.

Hardware that is stable and does the thing it was purchased for usually runs until the magic
smoke escapes.

>From a political point of view, Debian is completely right: Be Free!

From a business perspective they're right as well. When one finally needs to upgrade to a
newer version of the os, since the old version is no longer supported, debian is king. The
chances of a flawless upgrade are a lot larger when the entire system being upgraded consists
only of free software. And flawless upgrades result in less downtime.

Most of your criticisms are valid from a single end-user perspective and actually support a
business-case for using debian.
The only exceptions I can think of righ now are developer desktops, which tend to track the
latest hardware and businesses who have need of non-free software.

The only valid anti-business point you make is the unpredictable release cycle. It's why smart
businesses have competent in-house staff to keep tabs on debian, or hire someone who does.

>Debian is a very good distribution, for its purpose. But its purpose isn't to be used in a
corporate environment. 

Its purpose is to be a universal operating system, including the corporate environment, and it
is pretty succesful fulfilling that role.

>and an excellent basis for more business-like distributions like Ubuntu.

Maybe Debian lacks hype and friendly faces, but apart from these sales assets Ubuntu is just a
Debian that breaks down a lot (relatively). And 'breaks down a lot' is exactly the sort of
thing that serious businesses are trying to avoid.