Debian changed my life. My first look at an OS produced by a collective of disparate developers was RedHat 5.0 in the late 90s. Linux HOWTOs were basically all the docs I had. I got a pppd to answer the phone and dialed home from my friends house. I was logged in as root all the time. fvwm was the pinnacle of cool.
Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around LA and then someone gives you a car and a map — that was the kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me.
potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day, “sarge” still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it’s funny to see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means “futuristic out of touch thing” because I waited for it for so long.
I did my little part to help Debian: I ordered 100 CDs of Debian 1.1 (in 1996? 1997?) from the US to Europe, which I then shipped to 100 people in Europe (and even some in north Africa). I ran out of the 100 CD and ordered 30 more and by then it was already Debian 1.2!
(my old memory may be failing: it may have been 1.2 then 1.3 and not 1.1 then 1.2)
It was hard to get Linux distro for some of us back then: dial-up at best and otherwise we'd buy magazines or books that'd come with a Linux CD.
I've basically been using Debian and derivatives since forever. Did a short stint with Red Hat and Fedora back in the days but came back to Debian.
Before Debian I was using Slackware.
And as you said: thanks so much to everyone who worked on Debian!
That mirrors my first Linux/Unix experiences in the late 90s. Except for a short go at OpenBSD for firewalling between trying Redhat 5.0 and ending up on Debian.
Debian just felt so much more "right" to me than Redhat did back then, and I never really went back to the Redhat side of the fence. This was despite Debian having way less third party support for anything back then - it wasn't really until Ubuntu took off that Debian (by extension) felt secure. Up until then, I always had a nagging feeling that the Redhat ecosystem would completely take over, and I would yet again have picked/preferred the wrong horse in the technology world.
A big thank you to all the Debian devs/maintainers over the years.
> 1) someone who will eventually be willing to allow me to upload the
release to their anonymous ftp-site. Please contact me.
Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the most convenient drag&drop sharing site.
> Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at different companies, would have been interesting to hear his reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders as far as I know.
Of course, for anyone who wants up-to-the-minute Unstable/Testing channel, Debian still has that as an option, but I'm with you on Debian Stable.
When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing. (When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages, in a way that now seems naive and reckless: "https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/#software".)
The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need, so I still get the APT experience. (I even got the closed Nvidia CUDA stack from Debian Stable `non-free` repos, the other day, and it just worked. Maybe a little too easily and well, but that's another matter.)
> When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing.
I think a lot of people who came to Linux later don't fully realise how revolutionary apt was back then.
I can still remember the pain of manually downloading rpms only to find it needed another one installed first or wasn't version compatible with something else etc.
I recently had to reinstall Win11. I don't use it, but I needed to keep it around.
Windows Update does not update packages from the Windows Store, or vice versa.
Aside from the dozens of external driver packages you need, and even using Ninite to get a basic set of working apps, you still need 2 totally separate tools to update Windows.
It says a lot about how bad Linux on the desktop still is today that some poor misled fools still think that Win11 plus WSL2 is a better Linux than Linux.
I've been on Windows 10 (because i use Linux as my main OS in recent years and only boot Windows once every few months), so i don't know the latest details.
> The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need
At times it's missing something I want but usually Debian stable is all I need. I don't use unstable or backports: typically I either use Debian stable or I compile from source (like Emacs).
Last little hiccup recently is the lack of support for JPEG XL in the latest ImageMagick shipped with Debian stable (if I'm not mistaken), so I'd need to compile it from source (haven't done it yet but it's on my todo list: I want to recompile "losslessly" all my JPG to JPEG XL).
To this day, I still don’t quite get why so much of #linux was still using Red Hat at the time. Nat, miguel, the GNOME guys; the kernel guys; the storage guys.
I worked with him at the time of his death shortly after Christmas of 2015. There was definitely a toxic twitter mob, and it's also true that he had been in police custody the day before, but whether either of these things was the reason for his suicide was never clear.
> Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
Testing is pretty stable for something named "testing" and unstable is remarkably stable for something called stable. Well, except that one month every 2 years after release where all that was frozen for release gets unfrozen..
And it being stable is not only important feature. The upgrades just work, better than in any other distro I tested (unless you make frankendebian but even then surprisingly often it also "just works". Slap unattended-upgrades package with some settings and you can basically forget it if it is just some service
I honestly think debian does itself a disservice with calling testing testing. Testing is what any other distro would call stable, and stable is the sort of stable you need for running nuclear reactors and the like.
How many people installed debian stable and bounced off because all the packages were quite old?
My first awareness of Debian was in a surplus electronics store in Rohnert Park California. A kid who bore a striking resemblance to Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SCTV brought a fat stack of floppy disks to the check-out and then proudly proclaimed that he was using them for installing Debian linux. Bless him.
Early Linux is before my time in computing. Had to look up SLS - Softlanding Linux System[0] - thought it might have been something to do with Slackware.
While a college student, Murdock founded the Debian project in August 1993, and wrote the Debian Manifesto in January 1994. Murdock conceived Debian as a Linux distribution that embraced open design, contributions, and support from the free software community. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself.[3] They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.[4]
The guy was sexually assaulted and then accused himself of sexual assault which got him “cancelled.” I followed him on Twitter back then, it’s hard to imagine it not being suicide after all of that.
Nice to see the key innovation described so well: "The system will be easy to keep up-to-date with a 'upgrading' script in the base system"
I don't know that dpkg was the first such upgrade system but it definitely still is one of the best. And continues to be, many later imitators are not nearly as effective. A key part of that is all the work done in packaging so that the packages are maintainable and upgradeable, of course.
I gave an online talk[1] about the history and future of package management last year that you might find interesting. It was very difficult to determine exactly what was the 'first'; as is often the case with big ideas, the Linux community seemed to spontaneously decide that it was needed and came up with multiple solutions in the space of just a few years. Even the question itself is complicated, because software did not typically come with a clear 'release date', which it usually has now.
Ultimately, the conclusion I drew from my research was that Bogus Linux[2] (which is still available, but no longer maintained) was the first distribution with a fully functional, system-wide binary package manager, but that Perl might have a had a functional package manager limited to Perl libraries in development or even in use by some in 1993 too.
Oh fascinating, thanks! Yeah CPAN dates to about 1993. CPAN in turn was based on CTAN (for TeX), which Wikipedia dates to 1991 or 1992. I used both systems in the early/mid 90s and they were not very good. CPAN in particular had a penchant for deciding to rebuilding and reinstall everything, including the Perl interpreter.
I assume the general idea is older, going back to at least the 70s and minicomputers or the like.
Certainly first that actually worked well. My current desktop was installed in 2007 and still just dist-upgraded to the current.
That of course if packages are done well, but Debian organization process so far have been very good on quality. Different song with 3rd party packages of course...
dpkg handles individual packages, while APT is used to handle dependencies and version upgrades. I recall using dselect as a predecessor of APT in the beginning, but I don't know if it was part of the first release.
EDIT: dselect was developed at the same time as dpkg and was initially considered a part of it, so in that sense it was possible to upgrade a system by using just dpkg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dselect
If you're using Debian, you can apt-install the debian-history package, which will put some nice HTML files in your /usr/share/doc/debian-history directory outlining the history of the project!
I now have 2 machines that are older than 13 years (one 2007, other 2010 install) and just dist-upgrade every 2 years. Ships of Theseus, both of them, everything replaced at some point.
Started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat 6 (NOT RHEL) that I got with some book, then Storm Linux that eventually got me into Debian.
The thing worth nothing back then is that if you wanted to say, install a package with dependencies, you could do that in installer of Red Hat or Mandrake, but tools in the OS didn't allow for that, yum only happened in 2002. So the first shock with Debian derivative was that I could just tell it to install package and it will find the deps. And it could uninstall those deps too! And UPGRADE WORKED!
After Mandrake/Red Hat it was like a miracle. I also liked the fact Debian kept it "as vanilla as possible while still playing nice with rest of the packages, instead of... whatever the fuck RHEL was doing (without exaggeration we thousands lines of code of fixes for stuff in RHEL5/6... that just went away when we moved to Debian as there it worked).
Wonderful distro, can't recommend it enough, especially on servers, slap unattended-upgrades on it and can basically forget it's there.
Quite the contrary, it aged extremely well. Debian testing/sid is very usable on a desktop/laptop; I've used it successfully in such fashion for something like a decade. Nowadays I do prefer a distro/OS with a 6-month release cycle (like NixOS or OpenBSD), but as far as rolling releases go, Debian has always been great.
It would have been fair to say it aged well, if the version which is currently called testing was their flagship version.
For most software, the testing version gives you relatively latest stuff. But that doesn't mean every software can advertise itself as being up-to-date.
For debian specifically, I don't think they recommend using the testing version unless you're a Debian contributor/tester.
I've tried using Sid (desktop) in the past, but ran into several version issues while installing through apt. Didn't try much to debug, and switched to stable. Been a happy user since!
In my experience 'sid' is what you typically use on desktops, 'testing' on servers you actively maintain, and 'stable' for servers that you just want to keep running without much fuss. 'sid' can have some interim issues, but nothing significant enough that it would disqualify it from desktop use; and 'testing' is really solid already for those who don't feel like power users much.
Debian Sid is the original rolling release. Its advantage is is that you are on a rolling-release distro but it's still Debian, so all the system knowledge you accrue will apply seamlessly to production Debian servers. Most rolling-release distros, on the other hand, are typically not used on production servers.
Sid is not a rolling release. This is a common misconception.
In preparation for a new stable release, it goes through what is effectively a package freeze. Maintainers are discouraged from updating packages in Sid in order to focus on the new release. So almost no new updates are uploaded to the repositories until Stable is finally out.
That's not exactly a hard rule, just stuff maintainers do because it is far easier to still have normal flow of unstable -> testing for the freeze period, and keeping 2 ("actual unstable" + "unstable on the way to the new release") would be a big burden for maintainers.
Also, packages are tested in sid/unstable and migrates to testing which then becomes the new stable when it's ready.
And packages are tested across releases, enabling one to dist-upgrade to a new version of the system easily. I think it's piuparts that does this job of testing packages among themselves too.
Like toyg says, I really enjoyed having a familiar working environment both on servers and on my workstation. When big changes would come around (like the transition from SysV init to systemd), I'd start getting hands-on experience early, and upgrade production with more confidence.
Between testing/sid/experimental you also got the choice of running "somewhat stable" vs "bleeding edge"; I'd usually stick to testing (except around the freeze leading up to a release).
I rather meant irregular with regards to Debian Sid not Debian in general.
Arch only has rolling release mode so everyone is using the latest (thus any potential issue in Arch will affect bigger % of Arch users) while Debian has stable and testing and I was wondering if that'd make Sid less stable for practical use (since "it's not stable").
I don't want to start a distro war here, just wondering about some anecdata of actual distro users.
I'd think that both distros work with upstream as much as possible when bugs are found. I'm too lazy to do it, but you could check both distro's bugtrackers for activity to know if one really generates more checking than the other, but I'd be surprised if in practice there's a big difference. Maybe pick a few packages, see how fast fixes are merged?
Anecdata, if you aren't advanced user with new hw, Sid might be more robust, otherwise Arch is superior in almost any way. I wish it wasn't, I like Debian community more, it is less elitist.
Well, you might think that if you know nothing about Debian. I recently was debugging kernel bug and to check whether it still happens in latest mainline I just... installed package directly from Debian repos.
I went to Purdue. Its LUG had 10 year birthday party of Debian, and alumnus Ian Murdock was there. Sadly, it was a week before the semester started, so I wasn't in-town, yet.
Hey, we were at Purdue at the same time (I graduated December '04)! That means the chances of me having met you in person are very slightly elevated compared to just a random person on HN...
It's amazing that when I discovered debian in 1997, it was just the thing that was the normal way to do Linux (OK, there were other competing options that were nice too), but actually it was a pretty new idea.
> Yes, that’s an actual scanned printout of the Debian announcement. I received such an overwhelming number of responses I had to print them out to avoid filling my 500 kilobyte (!) disk quota on the student Sequent Symmetry.
> This library will contain packages like the S3 X-server
It took me a moment to realize he meant a version of X for S3 cards. In the meantime, my brain was trying to imagine an X server running from an AWS bucket...
Lost to history is the fact that XFree86 version 3 provided a different binary for some families of graphics card. If you owned an S3 911 (a very common "Windows accelerator" at that time) you needed XF86_S3 but if you owned one of S3's execrable ViRGE 3D cards you needed XF86_S3V. Having a single server that contained or could load every driver did not come until version 4.
Did it already have the .deb package format and the amazing apt repositories at this point? To me that is what blew my mind; the transitive dependency management and automatic upgrades made me not touch an RPM based distro again.
I don't recall using this first release, I was probably still on SLS or something then, and I believe I briefly played with RedHat... But I did use it maybe a year or two later, and haven't stopped (okay, sometimes I use Ubuntu, shh).
1993 was around the time I first installed Linux. I can't remember much of it though, but I think the first distro I installed was Slackware? Maybe? I just remember being kind of jazzed about configuring it to look much like IRIX, which I was using on SGI machines at the shop I was working at the time.
I remember Debian coming out then too, but forever reason I went with Slackware (I think) as my very first install. My brain is all fuzzy now.
I have been happily using Debian, and its derivative Ubuntu since 1997. They do great work, and getting involved as a Debian packager was a great way to get involved in the world of open source for someone like me who had no college CS or professional background at that point. Indeed, it was a stepping stone to getting a job as a software developer.
Speaking of which, I installed Ubuntu today on my new home server, and, after having to remove snap and disable ads in the MOTD, I'm wondering whether a better choice exists.
I just need something that will run Docker and will support my NUC's hardware well. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Debian won't have snaps unless you install them, and they're including firmware blobs in the default release now. If you really need a recenter Docker, you can install it from the Docker website instead of apt.
Debian stable will just keep on ticking and refuse to surprise you.
Here you go: https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst . That image will give you a quicker small download; the rest of the packages will download during installation.
Debian is currently on version 12, named Bookworm. If you install the stable version (the default option, which is similar to an Ubuntu LTS; I highly recommend it unless you know you need otherwise, and it's easy to change to testing or unstable in an existing install) it'll EOL in June 2026.
EDIT: One last question, does this include something like Ubuntu's fwmgr? After my Samsung SSD shipping with a critical bug that fwupd silently upgraded me away from, that's something I'm really looking for in an OS.
Getting targetted (mistakenly or not) by the law enforcement for certain minor offences seems to be one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you: they won't investigate carefully and they won't presume you're innocent.
Plainclothes officers acted like thugs/thieves, and then beat him up, and nearly murdered him. After that they charged him with an array of federal criminal offenses (including resisting arrest, assaulting them (the police), etc). This went all the way to a federal jury trial (which defendants rarely win), which he did win. The amount of emotional psychological trauma this must have caused is inexcusable. There's more details here: https://ij.org/case/king-v-brownback/ – quote:
> Worse still, Kent County, Michigan, prosecutors refused to drop the charges. Instead, after James rejected a plea offer, prosecutors subjected him to a criminal trial. Thankfully, a jury acquitted James of all charges. If James had been convicted or pleaded guilty, he could have faced decades in prison, and it would have been nearly impossible for him to sue the officers and hold them to account for their actions that violated his constitutional rights.
A summary execution by cop, regardless of how much you resist, should not be the punishment for any crime, yet we have enough bootlickers and sycophants that want to give the police carte blanche (yet also claim to be skeptical of government power somehow).
> if you read the autopsy report there are a variety of injuries that you'd have to try pretty hard to inflict on yourself, but are absolutely consistent with being beaten and thrown to the ground, and then having someone dead-drop knee-first into your back.
and that kind of treatment is hardly unlikely (though not, i think, forgivable) when cops find a drunk guy banging on the door of someone else's house insisting it's his own
From the first comment [0] on that discussion: "They found chlordiazepoxide, diazepam, temazepam, and oxazepam in his bloodstream, which could have had some terrible interactions with alcohol. This sounds more to me like a drug overdose that caused a psychological episode than just the alcohol-fueled suicide they make it out to be."
"Temazepam (sold under the brand names Restoril among others) is a medication of the benzodiazepine class which is generally used to treat severe or debilitating insomnia." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temazepam
That's four benzo's. The whole class of drug is known to be degenerative: they perfectly treat anxiety for 2-3 weeks, then you need to up the dose just to feel normal. Looks like Ian was on a benzo spiral.
The anxiety tragedy is that there used to be a very safe GABA supplement, GHB, in supplement stores, but this supplement got scheduled because it's also useful as a date-rape drug. GABA itself doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, but GHB does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid
i didn't realize that; thank you for the added information
psychiatric drugs can have surprising effects, but generally the terrible interaction benzodiazepines have with alcohol is that they send people into a potentially fatal coma, rather than causing suicide attempts or psychotic episodes
the hangover, though...
withdrawal from ghb doesn't sound like a picnic either, often including delirium
that blog post is pretty appalling; the author admits to intentionally submitting his 'friend' to alcohol withdrawal. doesn't he know delirium tremens routinely causes permanent brain damage
GHB is approved for narcolepsy - I understand it helps improve the quality of sleep.
My friend ran out of alcohol - we were not aware of how much she was drinking. She lived with her mother at the time - her mother & aunt called the mental health crisis team on the first day of alcohol withdrawal. She was taken to the hospital. I think she was likely tranquilized with haloperidol. This is not an appropriate treatment for alcohol withdrawal, but it's reasonable under the psychiatric standard of care.
i think timely treatment with haldol can in fact significantly reduce or even entirely prevent the excitotoxic brain damage from alcohol withdrawal, but i'm not certain of that
Haloperidol is sort-of useful for it's anti-serotonin properties [0]. The Soviets used this drug to induce agony in political dissidents.
The physiology of psychosis is now fully described, so there's no need to use haloperidol as a palliative 'anti-psychotic' anymore.
Someone responded to my comment yesterday [0] to mention pimavanserin, an antipsychotic that works as an anti-serotonin drug (rather than an anti-dopamine drug).
Carbohydrates and protein provide 4 calories/gram, fats provide 9 calories/gram. Alcohol provides 7 calories/gram. Alcoholics train their nervous system to run on acetate, one of the breakdown products of ethanol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14085230
Rather than tranquilizing patients with haldol, how can the withdrawal patient's nervous system be fed?
A social worker I knew said one way to help with alcohol withdrawal is to provide a lot of sugar. The potassium in orange juice allows the body to use the sugar without having to release insulin. Other juices have less potassium, but would also be good.
I'm aware of some other gentle interventions too. Anything's better than inducing agony with haloperidol.
when i've seen people on haldol they haven't been in anything approaching agony; rather the contrary, it induces apathy, which tends to take away agony and anxiety
(of course, as i said above, psychiatric drugs can have a lot of surprising effects)
i'm skeptical of the metabolic claims in your comment
Debian changed all that. Local, top quality documentation. A community. Packages that had been hand crafted to work like the rest of the system. The friction disappeared and let me move freely around the OS discovering things. Imagine walking around LA and then someone gives you a car and a map — that was the kind of difference in quality of experience it gave me.
potato worked. woody felt like the future. I ran it for years on my iBook G3 (which one of the DDs helped me set up.) To this day, “sarge” still feels like the ultimate next gen, so it’s funny to see it is actually pretty old. To me, sarge means “futuristic out of touch thing” because I waited for it for so long.
Thank you all so much.