Happy belated birthday, Debian

A check over at Planet Debian revealed a lot of chatter about Debian's 17th birthday.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the Debian Project, past and present for providing a distribution that has been invaluable to me since I began using Linux in 2007.

Debian consistently runs on more machines — and runs better — than just about anything else out there.

As I've written dozens of times, the six months or so that I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop OS were the most trouble-free and productive six months I've ever had in FOSS operating systems.

I'm running Fedora 13 right now on my "main" machine, and I really like it, but I still have machines running Debian and don't see any reason for that to change.

I consider Debian an essential resource for the computing community worldwide.

When people talk about how Ubuntu is for newbies and Debian and Slackware are only for hard-core geeks, don't listen to them. As pillars of the Linux and overall free, open-source software ecosystem, both Debian and Slackware are more than graspable by anyone willing to read, listen and learn.

Sooner than later, you're going to run into trouble in Ubuntu, and your efforts to figure out what's wrong and fix it will pretty much mirror what you'd be doing in Debian. By that I mean the skills you learn (and you WILL need to learn them) to keep Ubuntu running are directly applicable to Debian (and to some extent Slackware, but it isn't Slackware's birthday today).

What I'm trying to say is that Debian is not an in any way exclusively an expert's distro, though many so-called experts use it.

I'm not knocking Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community. I consider myself part of the Ubuntu community as a user, I have a Launchpad account, yadda, yadda ... I have Ubuntu running on one machine now, and had another until a few weeks ago (which I'm now using to experiment with a GNOME OpenBSD desktop), and you can't and shouldn't ignore the enormous interest in and community around Ubuntu. More times than I can remember, I've solved problems in my Debian installations with advice from the Ubuntu Forums.

Think of Debian as a tool, a resource and an example of what FOSS can and should be. Sure it's not perfect. Nothing is. But I'd hate to live in a world without Debian.

Happy birthday, big D.