Debian why

Proprietary drivers for hardware are available if necessary. Debian offers a flexible Installer. Our Live CD is for everyone who wants to give Debian a try before installing it. It also includes the Calamares installer which makes it easy to install Debian from the live system. More experienced users can use the Debian installer with more options for fine-tuning, including the possibility to use an automated network installation tool. Debian provides smooth Upgrades.

It's easy to keep our operating system up-to-date, whether you want to upgrade to a completely new release or just update a single package. Debian is the Base for many other Distributions. We provide all the tools so that everyone can extend the software packages from the Debian archive with their own packages if needed.

The Debian Project is a Community. Everyone can be a part of our community; you don't have to be a developer or sysadmin. Debian has a democratic governance structure. Since all members of the Debian project have equal rights, Debian cannot be controlled by a single company. You don't need to search for a separate version of Debian either. You can simply opt not to install a desktop environment during installation and grab server-related tools instead.

Your server doesn't need to be connected to the web. You can use Debian to power your own home server available only to computers on your Wi-Fi network. If you combine it with Nextcloud or OpenMediaVault, you have yourself a handy cloud replacement. Stable, time-tested software is great, but many of us want the latest versions of software on our PCs. When apps and interfaces gain new features, waiting several years for them to come to Debian is longer than many of us are willing to do.

Fortunately there are multiple versions of Debian to pick from. While Debian Stable is multiple years out of date, it's not the only version available. If you opt for Debian Testing, Unstable, or Experimental, you can choose the balance between stability and having the latest features that you're most comfortable with. With Debian Unstable or Experimental, rather than wait for new versions of Debian to launch, you get to use one continuous version that regularly receives updates for apps and components as they're available.

That makes Debian a rolling release distro that's easier to install than alternatives like Arch Linux. When you first switch to Linux, the most important question is whether you can even install the distribution.

For example, if you have a Mac with a PowerPC processor rather than Intel, your options are more limited. Even with Intel hardware, if you have an older bit machine, many Linux distributions will no longer work. Debian provides installers for a wide range of architecture. You can run Debian on 32 and bit Intel computers. Support is also available for bit PowerPC machines. Debian does that too. Many people are drawn to Linux because of the free software culture. The GNU operating system has shown that code can be developed, shared, and maintained without a profit motive driving the creation.

Why Debian? By Manoj Srivastava srivasta at debian. I am also not a prime candidate for advocacy of my choices, since the reasons I have chosen what I like are unlikely to be universal, and the environment in which I originally made my decision since there is a modicum of historical inertia that keeps me where I am no longer exists. However, I have tried to make this talk have a broader perspective than my views alone, and have solicited the opinions of other folks that have made the same choices that I have -- but given how subjective this topic is, I am going to speak here mostly from my perspective, and the perspective of people who have already selected Debian.

Given the nature of the primary audience for this talk, I am not going to spend much time expanding on why one should choose a UNIX like OS over Microsoft's operating systems.

Suffice it to say that the following criteria pointed me unequivocally away from Windows: Security. Control of features.

Availability and choices in application software. Susceptibility to Worms and Viruses. Openness and speed of resolution of known flaws. Multi-user OS. Philosophy and Community Ultimately, philosophy is the most durable differentiating criterion between the operating systems we are considering. Performance numbers change.

Ease of use, reliability, availability of software -- all these characteristics change over time, and you have to go out and re-evaluate them over time.

I must confess that philosophy and community is what led me originally into the Linux camp, and then to Debian; and I think these are still the most important criteria, and are often underrated. Why is free software a good thing? Over nearly two decades that I have been involved with free software, I have asked people this question and often been surprised by the answers. The popular answer seems to be because it is cool, or because it is zero-cost.

The motivations of the authors also are varied, but the coin that they get paid in is often recognition, acclaim in the peer group, or experience that can be traded in in the work place. I like to give the analogy to the manner in which academic research is conducted. If researchers were doomed to reinvent the wheel, and discover for themselves everything beyond what existed in the textbooks, then progress in the research community would be stunted.

Most of my peers got their start in research by doing literature searches, looking for interesting investigations, and perhaps correlating unrelated papers, building on the ideas and techniques of other researchers in the field.

The secrecy shrouding research in most labs exists only till the moment of publication -- and then people share their techniques, and ideas, and results -- indeed, reproducibility is a major criteria of success. Contrast this with proprietary software, where we do all begin from scratch -- I believe we could soar, if only we could freely share and build upon the ideas and labours of others. This would lower the time, effort, and cost of innovation, allow for best practices and design patterns to develop and mature, and reduce the grunt programming that raises the barrier to developing solutions in house.

We just have to ensure that the incentive for achievement still exists and it need not be purely a profit motive. This belief led me to chose the GPL, and free software foundation view of things, as opposed to the BSD licence, which are also free software licenses, and led eventually to choosing Debian.

In my personal opinion, the BSD license has been more about personal pride in writing free software, with no care as to where the software went; I want more than that.

I want my labours to help build a synergistic community; to feed back into a well spring of useful software.

Debian is an exercise in community barn building; together, we can achieve far more than we could on our own. The Debian social contract is an important factor in my choice of Debian, with its blend of commitment to free software, and pragmatic recognition that there are going to be cases where usability demands software that does not meet our guidelines.

What turned me off was the caste system that permeated the BSD community. There were core developers up on high, and you went down to lowly newbie wannabe contributors. The Linux community, though rambunctious, seemed far more inclusive -- your pedigree mattered less than the code you produced.

And I could contribute immediately to developing the OS I would be running. I guess this is another reason I like Debian -- I have been there long enough to guide it into being the OS that is laid out the way I think. Utility and usability Assuming I have not totally lost the pragmatists amongst you, the criteria that the vast majority of people hold highest while choosing an operating system are, after cost, utility and usability.

Of course, utility depends on what your goals and requirements are, but there broad areas we can still address. There is more to an operating system than a kernel with a hodge-podge of software thrown on the top - systems integration is a topic usually given short shift when discussing the merits of a system.

But a well-integrated system - where each piece dovetails with and accommodates other parts of the system - has greatly increased utility over the alternative. Debian, in my experience, and the experience of a number of my respondents, is the best integrated OS out there.

Apart from this, packages are categorized according to priority Essential through extra , and their function. This richness of the relationships, of which the packaging system is aware and pays attention to, indicates the level at which packages fit in with each other. Debian is developed by about volunteers. That means that every developer is free to maintain programs he is interested in or he needs for his special tasks in real life. That's why Debian is able to cover different fields of specializations - its developers just want to solve their own special problems.

This broad focus is different from commercial distributions which just try to cover mainstream tasks. I have found that the Debian machines at work take less hand holding, are easier to update, and just plain don't break as often as the Red Hat and Mandrake boxes I manage. I am told that dealing with SunOS, for example, is far more, umm, interesting.

One of the reasons for selecting Debian over other distributions is the sheer size of the project which strongly suggest that Debian won't suddenly disappear and one is suddenly left without any support. Debian can't go bankrupt. Its social contract doesn't allow the project to abruptly decide not to support non enterprise versions of the distribution.

I do not want my OS to be held hostage to anyone's business plan! You can fine-tune the degree of risk you want to take, since Debian has three separate releases: Stable, Testing, and Unstable. On some of our machines the server, the kiosk machines we run 'stable'. You can find me at my personal website.

Only to have issues doing stuff that is painless on other distros like Arch or Void. Finding issues with stuff not built into the kernel, been compiled out of a package, or is possible on Arch or Void because of updates or bug fixes or by merit of not being modified.

If you could have provided examples that would have made for a constructive discussion. There may be patches which Arch or Void which are out of the tree-kernel. But for things which are out-of-the-tree Debian tries to maintain the least delta vis-a-vis the kernel.

Kernel Upstream development is another dynamic altogether and it makes sense at least for Debian to hold off when there are two or more patches by different authors who solve an issue in slightly different ways. While other distros. If you have any specific suggestions, it will be my pleasure to pass to the various sub-projects within Debian. Please log in again.

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