I wrote the article. In what way do you feel I am being "overly kind"? You baldly state this as an assertion without any backup or argument or evidence to support it.
> I appreciate the "news not editorial" flavour
Not really, no. I added in the analysis and evaluation that I felt it merited.
> but the real story is that Ubuntu apparently consider themselves apart from the community that makes their software
Why do you feel that that is "the real story"? On what basis?
Ubuntu is not a community distro. Ubuntu is built and maintained by Canonical on the basis of Debian.
Debian is a community distro.
The Ubuntu remixes are, arguably, community distros, but a requirement of being an official remix is only using upstream Ubuntu packages. I specifically spelled that out in the article, with a link for citation, but the reason I know is that I approached Canonical and asked about making new remixes, years ago, and they told me no, for 2 reasons:
* One was that one of my planned remixes used proprietary freeware. This, for clarity, did in the end get launched as a product, but without Ubuntu branding, at Canonical's demand.
* The other one needed external repos because the versions in Ubuntu's repos are too old. Ubuntu would not take newer versions into their repos; the packages came from Debian, and Debian didn't have current versions, so for Canonical it was Somebody Else's Problem and there the discussion ended.
> and they should now be consigned to history by that community
If you don't want to use an Ubuntu remix, nobody is forcing you.
But millions do, more than any other free Linux distro. Ubuntu has merits. Its users like those. Some don't. Debian hasn't gone away. Neither has Slackware, one of the few distros that predate Debian.
That is how evolution works. We humans evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeys, which evolved from things very like lemurs, but all of those still exist because they are very good at doing what they do and being what they are. Monkeys are better at being monkeys than humans are at being monkeys.
Debian is better at being Debian than Ubuntu is, so Debian continues to exist.
Debian continues to be rather harder to install, which is why SpiralLinux exists.
Debian continues to be rather dogmatic about init systems, which is why Devuan and antiX and MX Linux exist.
Debian continues to be built from rather out of date packages, which is why siduction exists.
Wait, what?
I wrote the article. In what way do you feel I am being "overly kind"? You baldly state this as an assertion without any backup or argument or evidence to support it.
> I appreciate the "news not editorial" flavour
Not really, no. I added in the analysis and evaluation that I felt it merited.
> but the real story is that Ubuntu apparently consider themselves apart from the community that makes their software
Why do you feel that that is "the real story"? On what basis?
Ubuntu is not a community distro. Ubuntu is built and maintained by Canonical on the basis of Debian.
Debian is a community distro.
The Ubuntu remixes are, arguably, community distros, but a requirement of being an official remix is only using upstream Ubuntu packages. I specifically spelled that out in the article, with a link for citation, but the reason I know is that I approached Canonical and asked about making new remixes, years ago, and they told me no, for 2 reasons:
* One was that one of my planned remixes used proprietary freeware. This, for clarity, did in the end get launched as a product, but without Ubuntu branding, at Canonical's demand.
* The other one needed external repos because the versions in Ubuntu's repos are too old. Ubuntu would not take newer versions into their repos; the packages came from Debian, and Debian didn't have current versions, so for Canonical it was Somebody Else's Problem and there the discussion ended.
> and they should now be consigned to history by that community
If you don't want to use an Ubuntu remix, nobody is forcing you.
But millions do, more than any other free Linux distro. Ubuntu has merits. Its users like those. Some don't. Debian hasn't gone away. Neither has Slackware, one of the few distros that predate Debian.
That is how evolution works. We humans evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeys, which evolved from things very like lemurs, but all of those still exist because they are very good at doing what they do and being what they are. Monkeys are better at being monkeys than humans are at being monkeys.
Debian is better at being Debian than Ubuntu is, so Debian continues to exist.
Debian continues to be rather harder to install, which is why SpiralLinux exists.
Debian continues to be rather dogmatic about init systems, which is why Devuan and antiX and MX Linux exist.
Debian continues to be built from rather out of date packages, which is why siduction exists.
And so on.