Hari's Corner

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Why Debian is the near-perfect distro

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Sat, Mar 11, 2006 at 18:27 IST (last updated: Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 22:36 IST)

I would boldly venture to say that nearly one-fourth of all Linux installations out there are Debian or Debian-based distributions. I am no statistician and this figure could be way off target, but this seems a reasonable assumption considering Debian's huge community and its innate strengths.

I would also say that Debian is the near perfect Linux distribution (that's because nothing is perfect in its purest sense). Why? Let's take it from the top. Although this might sound biased, I venture to say that Debian has nearly everything that you expect from a modern Operating System. It is flexible, without being too complex, it has a fantastic, rock-solid base of developers who constantly upgrade and maintain tens of thousands of packages (and on more than one platform to boot), it provides something between a do-it-yourself style Slackware setup and a let-me-hold-your-hands approach of SUSE or RedHat which makes it so comfortable for a segment of users who are neither experts nor total newbies. And I suspect that this group of users are increasing by the day as Linux awareness grows. From newbie to expert is a long road and I suspect that the middle stage is the longest: somewhere between a newbie and an expert. So here are my points on Debian's biggest strengths.

All purpose and configurable

It is no surprise that Debian is sometimes called the mother of all distros (barring maybe Slackware which is just as old). With a Debian base, you can build a powerful developer workstation, a solid workhorse server, a useable desktop or a gaming machine without investing too much time. Since most of the hard work is done by Debian's great package maintainers, all you really need is to plan what packages you need on your system and forget about dependency resolution. Debian's kernels are also extremely reliable and it's quite hard to break a system without doing something really bad (like compiling a custom kernel wrong).

On the other hand, even the most ardent Slackware fans would agree that building a customized Slackware setup for a particular task, saying gaming, might be tougher because of the tons of configuration needed and manual dependency resolution. One thing I found on using Slackware is that you find yourself working much more to get the software you need rather than actually using that software to do something useful. This is not to say that Slackware is not customizable. In fact, it might be more customizable than Debian, but it's manual approach to almost every problem requires user intervention at lower level tasks which Debian automates seamlessly.

Nothing extreme about it

There is a certain sedateness about a Debian desktop that brings out the comfort level in me. I must say this is pretty subjective, but you always feel that Slackware users are somewhat elitist (apologies to Slack users, but this is just my observation - nothing personal) about their status as the geekiest group in the Linux community and SUSE/Mandriva/Fedora users are almost always first-time Linux users with a strong bias towards Windows and the desktop. With Debian users, you tend to get a fair mix of all kinds of users with different philosophies but with just one thing in common: a love for Debian. I realize that this is an extremely debatable point, but I have a feeling that many Debian users also feel the same way. Technically also, Debian reinforces this feeling by neither being an upwardly elite made-for-geeks distro nor a entry-level newbie distro with fancy, colourful GUIs by default.

Completeness

I'm repeatedly amazed at how complete this distro is. Not only in terms of overall packaging, but also the way the whole system is thought out. It feels more polished than some commercial distros. And it doesn't have a "niche" segment, meaning that it makes no assumptions about system configuration. Overall, I am yet to find a reason to switch to any other distro. While I keep playing with other distros, I keep coming back to Debian. Every other distro seems to have that certain "something" missing. Other distros also have a habit of forcing something on the user. I'm yet to see Debian forcing something on the user. Which brings me to my next point...

Doesn't get in the way

Although Debian critics might complain of certain things that Debian does, like automagically handling dependencies (hence cluttering up the system somewhat), it actually allows system configuration at the lower level if you have the inclination. That means, nobody's preventing you from compiling your own packages or preventing you from customizing your kernel. There's still a "Debian" way to do it (which is recommended, like the make-kpkg package for custom kernel compiling) but nothing stops a user from doing it the "Linux" way, if you will. The biggest complaint that most people have of Debian is that it forces users to do it the Debian way. Not so. While it might lead to a more cluttered system, but the options are still available. Admittedly though, you are left on your own if you get any system conflicts, but then, aren't users of other distros in a similar position if they experiment with their systems? The biggest advantage is that the Debian maintainers have a much better and cleaner way to do things and they give you that option at the click of a button (or a single command).

Solid community behind the scenes

The folk at Debian are probably the biggest group of unsung heroes in the Linux world. These volunteers do a fantastic job of putting together the biggest collection of Free Software in a convenient form for users. And to keep that constantly updated, maintained and within a system of checks and balances is a great job. Admittedly they're not perfect, but with a stable, purely official Debian distribution you're guaranteed that 99.9% of everything will work as expected. For this reason alone, I think Debian scores over other distros. In a word, Debian is much more than the GNU/Linux distribution it represents.

This also means: better quality of packages, better stability in the long run (although not always up-to-date with the latest and greatest) and above all, a solid working Linux distribution with a non-commercial vision.

I don't wonder that Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions which is still going strong.

10 comment(s)

  1. mmf. I didn't like it. :) I think the "didn't get in the way" point is debatable because people are different- perhaps you are just a natural debian user. I found Slack a lot easier to use. Grin. Anyway, debian is cool, but I would choose slackware for a general box.

    Comment by titanium_geek (visitor) on Sun, Mar 12, 2006 @ 10:27 IST #
  2. I agree - the "do everything manually" aspect of Slack can get wearing when you're just using it for day-to-day use. In fact, it was the biggest factor in making me look for another distro - I wanted a package manager :)apt-get is certainly one of the most impressive acheivements of the free software community. I see the debian-based Ubuntu has won LQ's distro poll of the year. I still wouldn't switch from Gentoo to Debian on my home PC, but if I get the laptop I've had my eye on I'll almost certainly put a debian-based distro on it.

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Sun, Mar 12, 2006 @ 18:30 IST #
  3. Personally, I view Slack and Debian as 2 sides of the same coin (stay with me here).They are both old, well loved and stable distros. They have a very strong following and you know that they will work, mostly of the box, on whatever hardware you throw them on - to one extent or another.They are also both very conservative distros when released, but both very easy to upgrade. Whenever I am asked what distro to use, I just say "it's horses for courses", pick the one you like best. For me, and all right thinking people ;), that's Slackware. But I can also see that Debian is ideal for other people.But Slackware rocks hardest, obviously :D

    Comment by ray (visitor) on Mon, Mar 13, 2006 @ 05:44 IST #
  4. Titanium_geek, thanks :P Yeah, I am not unbiased by any meansDominic, I like Gentoo a lot, but I find myself using it less and less and I haven't updated it in ages. Maybe it's because the compile time just eats too much into productive work time.Ray, I think you're right. Slack and Debian have a similar history in some ways but have evolved very differently, philosophy wise. Slackware is at its heart *nix while Debian is more than just GNU/Linux. Slackware is generally seen as pure Linux at heart while Debian tries to build an OS according to the philosophy of the FSF/FOSS community. Debian doesn't mind the kernel so much so long as the OS is built according to the community's guidelines, but Slackware will always remain Linux at heart

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Mar 14, 2006 @ 10:56 IST #
  5. I've never tried Debian - although you do make it sound quite convincing - because I never knew how many of the 10+ CDs I would need to download for a 'workable' installation. I didn't want a minimal one, because that may include enough software - however, I didn't have fast enough broadband to download all the CDs. ;)I like Slackware a lot - I have it installed on my laptop and it works like a charm. I can't say I've attempted installing anything on it yet, but I think I will end up going with swaret rather than the pure Slackware compile-packages-from-source way - the latter takes too long, and the dependency resolution is tedious at best.On this note - I'm going to give fixing the Slack desktop another shot when I get my hands on it in a week's time. Hopefully I'll be able to fix it this time..I have tried quite a few Debian-based distros though, and I like them a lot. KANOTIX was quite good, as was (K)Ubuntu, and a few lesser-known ones as well.. Never tried Gentoo - I don't have the 2 days or so to waste :D Great article Hari.

    Comment by J_K9 (visitor) on Tue, Mar 14, 2006 @ 13:15 IST #
  6. J_K9, Ubuntu won the LQ.org distro of the year. Since it's Debian based, I'm quite satisfied with the result... :) As for your question regarding how many CDs, I think you should download one DVD and that should do it. Saves a lot of space with one DVD rather than 5 or 6 CDs. That should be enough.Talking about Swaret/Slapt-get etc. I know they're convenience tools, but even there you won't get dependency resolution for the official Slackware packages and that's a big problem.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Mar 14, 2006 @ 17:32 IST #
  7. It's funny but being an actual Linux Systems Administrator, it's mainly Red Hat and CentOS. Those are probably the most popular in the corporate world. For those businesses that buy Red Hat to get support, they slap on CentOS on the machines they don't need official support but is pretty much the same configuration as the systems with Red Hat.But it's a totally different case when it comes to desktop systems and talking to other Linux users on forums and online. It seems the majority I know either use Slackware, Debian or Fedora.It is rare for me to ever encounter other Linux users who say they use Gentoo or Ubuntu. I'd probably say besides Slackware, Debian and Fedora, Suse is probably next in popularity. A majority of the admin's I know and work with all seem to use Fedora, since it's closely related to what they use at work, RHEL.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Wed, Mar 15, 2006 @ 08:56 IST #
  8. Drew, RedHat was popular quite a while back when it was free, but I get the impression that it's popularity has waned in the last couple of years after it became a paid distro, especially seeing the number of Debian-based distros increase. Also Slackware is always a steady contender, since it's been around for ages and always has a dedicated fan base.But I guess RedHat will remain a corporate Linux for years to come. It's support system and its ease of use are big strengths for large organizations looking for a Linux solution.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Mar 15, 2006 @ 10:48 IST #
  9. hari:You raise some valid points about Slackware configuration and package management, but IMHO, dependency resolution is largely overrated. Since gnome isn't included with Slackware, one can get into all sorts of nasty corners attempting to build apps with gnome lib deps, but otherwise, a full installation of Slackware (which, due to the relative inexpensiveness of disk space now, is a good idea in almost all cases) will provide almost all dependencies for many apps, and in those cases where it doesn't, the app's documentation will generally advise you of those dependencies.There are quite a few people in the Slackware community (myself included) who maintain Slackware packages for the most commonly wanted/needed applications, and more importantly IMHO, many of us also provide SlackBuild scripts allowing users to build custom packages of those applications so that there's no need to trust a third-party package. All things considered, I'll agree that Debian is a nice distribution; as you said, it's a good balance between customization ability, hand-holding, and ease of administration. Ultimately, the *best* choice can only be determined by each individual user's preferences - for me, that's Slackware, and that doesn't make you evil for choosing Debian :-)RW

    Comment by Robby Workman (visitor) on Mon, Mar 27, 2006 @ 01:58 IST #
  10. Robby Workman, thanks for dropping by here with your comments! :)Well, I think that even with Slackware, many people prefer swaret or slapt-get since the more apps you need on your computer. I think Slackware can be a good distro for a normal Linux installation. However, for a power desktop user needing a lot of apps, it can be a pain to configure to their needs because so many things (including dependency resolution) needs to be done manually).The more apps you have, the more dependencies you have and hence greater the hassle. Slackware is good for a stock Linux setup with only the apps available officially within that distro.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Mar 27, 2006 @ 07:32 IST #

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