I post not to bury Debian but to praise it
This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it's going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.
Just last night I pulled out my Compaq Armada 7770dmt — the 1999-era laptop that refuses to quit working and sports a 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive.
I once wrote a multipart series centered on which OS I should run on this laptop.
For just about a year now I've had Debian Lenny with a "custom" Xfce desktop — custom because I built it up from the "standard" install to keep it as lean as possible in the 2 GB I have set aside for /root and /swap.
With Debian, it just rolls down the track and keeps running. How many of today's distributions will even load up on a Pentium II?
Even though I'm running Fedora 13 right now (Fedora 14's not looking so good as far as video on this Lenovo G555, so I may be back to Debian sooner rather than later), I've tried Debian Squeeze, most recently with the Alpha 2 live image, and it's another solid system for what amounts to new hardware. Yep, machines spaced over 10 years apart can run the same distro.
As I've said many a time, if you can manage to avoid ill-time dist-upgrades (killed my Lenny-to-Squeeze plan about six months ago ... but I pulled the trigger at the wrong time), it's hard to do better security-, performance- or usability-wise than Debian. Sure some things are harder to configure than in Ubuntu. But nothing is that much harder, much less impossible. And you will see a performance bump.
I stray from Debian because I get itchy, but I often regret it. I've never run Testing for any length of time, or Sid/Unstable at all, and I probably should. But Debian Stable? It runs better on more machines than anything I've ever tried.
Can I see myself running Ubuntu again? Sure. But I can't see a time when I won't have a use for more than one instance of Debian.
4 Comments
Leave a comment
About this blog
Hi, Nice to see you like Debian that much, I just moved to Debian Lenny a month ago(I was inspired by your Debian post(s) the most, Thank you!) from Ubuntu(used it for 3 years), and I am impressed by the sheer stability and consistency with which it keeps performing, no more slow downs, crashes(My Ubuntu 9.04 used to hang sometimes after running some OpenGl games,... no i was not running compiz). I am satisfied with lenny+backports, what more you cloud ask for??
I am also thinking to try out Arch(in Vbox), what is your opinion about Arch?
I am lazy to read all that manual and stuff, keep upgrading twice a week or so, and hate to fix the minor breakages(The minor ones annoy you the most, not the major ones, mind it!!), but Arch users keep saying that it almost never broke for 6 months,1 or 2 years, and that it's difficult the first time but its easy. I
t's easy to maintain, blah,blah... they claim....., and I am unsure about that, for DD's put 18-22 months effort in Debian Stable and Arch Dev's just weeks and how could they claim it is stable?? Beats me!!
I was insanely googling for weeks, before this hit me- 'Why fix it when it ain't broke?'. But greediness for something good is not that bad,.. is it?..
I think this is my quest for the MOST stable and efficient OS(apart from Debian!), I am curious, so please shed some light on Arch, as I see most of your requirements match mine- OS that just works, easy to maintain, stable, ready to use s/w without much fuss etc.. also you give logical and practical opinions not some drumbeat..
Greetings from India! thank you :-)
Nice article, Steven. Would love to see you write something up on Fedora 14. I just switched my two aging Thinkpad T41's to Fedora 13 xfce spin from XUbuntu. Fedora 13 is running great but I'm a little concerned by your Fedora 14 comment.
Thanks, again, for the great Linux articles.
-Chad McCullough
I'm pretty concerned about Fedora 14 (and conversely about xorg, too). By the way, I'm now using a laptop with ATI graphics, not Intel.
@chad
It's not Fedora 14 but the 2.6.34 kernel. It just moved into Fedora 13, and my video (ATI Radeon HD 4200) is just about unusable. I filed a bug against the kernel in Fedora:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=617561