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CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 availableCyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 availablePosted Jun 27, 2012 8:00 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)In reply to: CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available by debacle Parent article: CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available
Apparently Debian and CyanogenMod are opposing poles of how to organize an Open Source distribution. Debian uses a very structured approach because the long term is the most important thing for it's members. CM on the other hand values quick releases (phone sets are not long lived machines like servers and desktops), and is thus gives up some organization in the name of having working stuff as soon as possible.
Is this characterization correct?
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CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 13:50 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Probably.
It's also safe to say that CM has a much wider audience and possibly more users then Debian ever had.
Also CM is able to do everything it does without breaking compatibility (mostly, there are the odd bugs it introduces) with software developed for other Android phones; which is key to it's success.
I have a feeling that a 'Debian-style' system would run rampant and start eliminating and changing android subsystems in a effort to force it to conform to a political viewpoint. Which would then pretty much ruin it completely for most people.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 14:05 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
> It's also safe to say that CM has a much wider audience and possibly more users then Debian ever had.
Could you post any numbers, please?
I can't imagine, that many people would install CM, because it the installation is hard (at least on my Samsung phone), many people fear loosing their warranty, or bricking their device. To use CM one needs to be fearless geek, while Debian can be run by almost anyone.
> I have a feeling that a 'Debian-style' system would run rampant and start eliminating and changing android subsystems in a effort to force it to conform to a political viewpoint.
You mean this stupid "free software" politics and useless "open source" ideology?
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 15:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
There is more than a million devices using CM, according to their stats (CM can send anonymous usage statistics).
That's probably about the number of Debian users.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 15:58 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
Thanks, the stats page http://stats.cyanogenmod.com/ even shows 2.4 million, including unofficial installs. One has to add sth. to the number, if some users do not participate in the statistics.
I have no idea about the number of Debian users, less so if one counts in derivates, such as Ubuntu, Mint, etc. I would believe anything between 1,000 users (roughly the number of Debian developers) and 1,000,000,000 (roughly number of PCs in use worldwide).
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 21:07 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Call me crazy, but there are a LOT more than 2.4 million debian servers on the internets if you count the derivatives like *buntu and how it basically rules this "cloud computing" phase.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 28, 2012 1:40 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I am not so sure: Amazon has most of the market for cloud computing, but its 0.5M servers run a Red Hat derivative (I assume it is Amazon Linux). Also, apparently there are less than 1M servers on the intertubes, and sadly not all of them are running Debian.I don't know how many machines running Ubuntu are there; I seem to recall another million of desktops. But it is difficult to characterize those as Debian, really. Then there are virtualized servers which are certainly Debian but they are not so easy to compute. I can create 10 instances at the push of a button; do they count? It is indeed a tricky question. I am sure that the Debian people must have stats of how many updates they see per day, and it would not be too hard to finger-print them, but I think nobody does.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 28, 2012 8:51 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
> I am sure that the Debian people must have stats of how many updates they see per day, and it would not be too hard to finger-print them, but I think nobody does.
I don't believe Debian could say how many downloads there are. Debian is distributed by a network of FTP/HTTP mirror servers, most of them outside any control by Debian. http://www.debian.org/mirror/list shows 50 primary and 400 secondary mirrors.
But some people don't even use them. E.g. if one has a root server at a hoster such as Strato, they use by default their own mirror server to save on traffic. In my company we produce an embedded product that runs Debian and of course the installation is done using our own partial mirror. Setting up a Debian mirror is so easy (much easier than it was for me to install CM on my phone) that one can assume that there are many thousands of them in universaties, companies and even private households.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 15:18 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] It's also safe to say that CM has a much wider audience and possibly more users then Debian ever had.I've never liked this argument because a traditional Linux distribution has vastly different goals than Android. Linux distributions are often user-installed and often appeal to a technical audience. Android has vastly different goals, and is far from a traditional distribution in maintenance and behaviour. Comparing Android to traditional distributions only makes sense in that both share the same kernel. I have a feeling that a 'Debian-style' system would run rampant and start eliminating and changing android subsystems in a effort to force it to conform to a political viewpoint. Which would then pretty much ruin it completely for most people.Android has benefited from those of us that ran Debian on ARM well before there was such a thing as Android. While I'm thankful for both traditional distributions like Debian *and* for Android, I certainly wish Android would be more like traditional distributions.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 15:26 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
> I've never liked this argument because a traditional Linux distribution has vastly different goals than Android.
drag did not compare Debian with Android, but Debian with CyanogenMod, if I'm not mistaken.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 15:51 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Essentially, yes. Since it appears that the original poster is lamenting that there isn't the equivalent of Debian for Android, as a alternative to using the anarchistic model that Cyanogenmod uses.
Personally I think that Linux distributions can learn a lot from Android. Specifically: that package consistency and compatibility between distributions matters massively even though everybody pretends it doesn't.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
Never mind the packaging, the ability to instal and upgrade applications independent of the OS, and vice versa.
My first Android device was an X10 mini pro running 1.6. I upgraded to 2.1. Then I upgraded to one of the Cyanogen-derived X10 2.2 releases. Then I got an Xperia Mini Pro running 2.3. Now I have 4.0 on it. Through that time I've been able to install and write applications that ran on 1.6 through to 4.0 without recompiling, and upgrade the OS under them; conversely I've been able to upgrade some applications to significant new releases without having to upgrade my whole operating system.
Desktop Linux is a pile of shit by comparison, from a user perspective, no matter how many times people stick their fingers in their ears and chant "la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you-users-don't-want-that".
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 28, 2012 9:19 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
There's actually few people that goes like that. Even some hight profile kernel hackers have acknowledged that distros have to change their desktop efforts in that direction. See https://plus.google.com/111049168280159033135/posts/V2t57... for reference.
But one thing is realizing that something has to be done, and another completely different is making it happen. Distros here are in fact part of the problem, because for many current Linux users they are "good enough".
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 18:57 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
For the point I was trying to make, there's not a difference between Android and CM. CM is much more transparent and friendly than its upstream Android, certainly. But it wouldn't be accurate to owe application compatibility, for example, simply to CM. CM and Android are more alike than different; they're related.
drag has a point that traditional distributions can learn from Android. Fair enough. Android, and its derivatives, could learn a lot from traditional distributions. I don't like the popularity argument for reasons I explained in another post.
I would argue that the success of Android isn't tied to its development model, its tied to the resources of Google. On the contrary, I see success despite its development model.
OT: CyanogenMod, Debian, etc. Posted Jun 27, 2012 19:24 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
As Linus pointed out in a recent interview, it boils down to what system is shipped pre-installed.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 21:29 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"It's also safe to say that CM has a much wider audience and possibly more users then Debian ever had."
I think tivo has a far wider audience than either. Which (AFAIK) manages to get by without any sort of user installable software. So clearly the whole idea of "software" is not needed at all.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 28, 2012 0:40 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] Debian in general has a policy of staying close to upstream, except where necessary. In terms of Android, "necessary" is basically about binary blobs. Its unlikely that Debian (or CM) would have permission to distribute the blobs necessary to run Android on phones. We would have to put them in non-free even if we had that permission. There are so many of those blobs (some that may contain backdoors) and the hardware is so varied that it is very hard for traditional Linux distros to support phones. When the device-tree stuff bears some fruit and we can build one generic kernel to support every device, this will get slightly easier. Unfortunately lots of blobs means we might need to rely on old kernels that will not be shipped in Debian. Old kernels are also necessary due to many Linux patches and drivers not being upstreamed, even the OpenMoko FreeRunner (gta02) suffers from that. If you want to run Debian (or Replicant or SHR) on your device, please join the Replicant and FreeSmartPhone folks in upstreaming patches, reverse engineering blobs and lobbying hardware vendors to release code. Packaging the Android UI components for Debian (or any other distro) is very easy compared to the challenges of supporting mobile hardware. There are also other open mobile stacks that could be packaged.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 16:02 UTC (Wed) by criswell (guest, #40091) [Link]
> (phone sets are not long lived machines like servers and desktops)
This mentality really should start changing now that we have so many Android-powered tablets. My Asus EEE Transformer is something I certainly plan on using as long as any laptop or desktop I've owned previously.
I'm aware there's nothing quite like Cyanogen for tablets (even though it does run on a couple), but I'd argue that the Debiandroid (someone mentioned elsewhere) concept would apply much more to tablets than phones.
CyanogenMod 9.0-rc1 available Posted Jun 27, 2012 18:05 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
The ICS package from http://corvusmod.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/android-ics-4-0... really gave my bunch of exoPC's and weTabs (fond memory of the MeeGo days) a new leash of life. Pity though that those tablets now work so well that my daughters have plundered my stash.
Pretty amazing for that heavy, ancient, outdated netbook hardware that never, not with MeeGo, not with WeTab OS, not with Plasma Active ever gave a fun user experience.
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