[tde-users] Re: Well, you've sold me, but . . .

said E. Liddell via tde-users: | Debian is the root distro of what's currently the largest and most | popular family of distros (excluding ChromeOS and Android), and while I | admit that that's an achievement in its own right, that doesn't mean | that it *is* Linux. I meant no offense, rather that distros come and go but Debian chugs along, neither the most bleeding edge nor Troglodyte Linux, its package format having withstood the test of time, no trick package systems designed only to gain commercial advantage. Many distributions have come and gone or become highly specialized. Debian is always there, always reliable, and you can get it now secure in the belief that in 10 or 20 years it won't have turned into something else. Look at what has happened to the other big distros of 20 years ago: Red Hat got infected by IBM; Caldera employed the Jim Jones/Jonestown model in an effort to bring about the suicide of all unices, but succeeded only in killing itself (I was not sad last week to see that the reprehensible Darl McBride has filed for personal bankruptcy); SuSE got sold and now basically does a server distro for businesses. Slack still exists, but that's about all you can say about it. Admittedly, Debian resembles a potato that has been in the bin under the sink for too long, and it has sprouted in every direction. But those things are just sprouts and without the potato itself they'd quickly die. Now, when I think of Linux I have to think of Debian, because despite the many come-and-go distributions that we hear of once but never again, it is the usable constant. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/