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PC Authority > Blogs > My other OS is Ubuntu > Does Debian still matter?

He may sound innocent, but Leigh Dyer has attempted to get Linux working on an iPod, which means help desk workers everywhere view him as "difficult". He also knows his stuff. Leigh is a software developer and systems administrator with more than 10 years Linux and Windows experience. He's been using Ubuntu since before its official announcement in 2004, although he's not afraid to admit he's also quite a fan of Mac OS X.

Does Debian still matter?

by Leigh Dyer

Apr 21, 2009 5:49 PM | 1 Comment

Debian was one of the first Linux distributions, and it pioneered much of what we take for granted in Linux systems today. But has Debian had its day?

The release last month of Debian 5.0, codenamed "lenny", has certainly been a success, but Debian has always been seen as a distribution made by geeks, for geeks, and has had trouble attracting new users.

In a world where Ubuntu combines Debian's package management technology, up-to-date software and a fixed six-month release cycle, is Debian still relevant as a distribution?

The Ubuntu factor
On the desktop, it's hard to argue the case for Debian, mainly because it's such a conservative distribution.

The Debian developers pride themselves on not making a new release until they feel it's ready, but this inevitably leads to delays, compounded by Debian's massive size (over 23,000 packages, supported on 12 different CPU architectures). The end result is that Debian releases are widely spaced -- the last release took 22 months, but the gap between the 3.0 and 3.1 releases was 35 months.

Even when a new Debian release arrives, it's often behind the competition, due to the long "feature freeze" window before each release, during which the developers are only allowed to make changes to fix bugs.

Ubuntu 8.10, which shipped in October last year, includes the GNOME 2.24 desktop, but last month's Debian lenny release runs GNOME 2.22, and even then it uses some 2.20 packages instead, due to perceived issues with the 2.22 release.

Ubuntu exists today specifically because of Debian's unsuitability for general desktop use. A group of Debian developers became frustrated at the fact that they couldn't recommend Debian to desktop users, especially those new to Linux, so they took a snapshot of the code, added the latest desktop apps, and pushed it out to an eager public with the promise of a new release every six months.

Ubuntu's runaway success has been a great validation of the technology behind Debian, but at the same time, it's all-but-destroyed the market for Debian on the desktop.

Base jumping
It's hard to overstate how important Debian is to the success of Ubuntu, though. While Ubuntu has come a long way, it's still very much based on Debian, and the Ubuntu developers still rely on the solid base that Debian provides them.

Debian is also largely responsible for Ubuntu's "universe" repository, which contains community-maintained packages for software outside of the core Ubuntu packages. The packages in "universe" are, for the most part, simply rebuilt from Debian's unstable tree.

Debian provides the base for a huge number of other distributions as well. Perhaps the best known is Knoppix, the original Linux live CD, which in turn has served as a base for distributions like Damn Small Linux and KnoppMyth, a specialised MythTV distribution. Other specialised distributions include 64Studio and Musix, both of which are optimised for music production.

At home in the server room
I do still think Debian has a place as a distribution in its own right, though, and that's in the server room. While enterprise deployments of Linux have traditionally focused on Red Hat and Novell, interest in community-driven distributions is increasing, especially as the credit crunch puts cost pressure on IT departments.

With the "lenny" release now out the door, Debian is in a perfect position to pick up some of those enterprise customers.

It's stability and long release cycles are major advantages: servers rarely need the latest and greatest apps, but they do need to run reliably, and without needing a major upgrade every 6-12 months. I've installed Debian systems and had them run for well over a year without rebooting, right up until the day I upgraded them to the next Debian release.

Admittedly, Debian's releases aren't as predictable as the fixed multi-year lifecycles of Red Hat's enterprise products, but each release is supported for a full 12 months after the next release becomes available, so you still get plenty of time to plan your upgrades.

The upgrades are about as easy as they could ever be, too, since a lot of work goes in to testing the upgrade proceses and documenting the major changes.

I've been using Debian on servers for nearly a decade now, and with "lenny" it's better than ever before. Sure, I've moved on to Ubuntu for my desktop, but with so many projects using Debian as their base, it's clear that Debian is still very relevant to Linux today, and it's going to stay that way for a long time to come.