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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.)

> 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).

> 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.

WINDOWS STILL CAN'T DO THAT

Winget with a huge "sort of ish".

They tried, I guess.

Not very hard.

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.

Can Windows install the Visual C++ runtimes yet?

Third-party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolatey

Chocolatey is great but has its own pile of quirks.

It certainly can.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/

This explains what freshmeat was; I hit it via google looking for an old scheme library, but the link's long dead.

nwv!

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.

> When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages,

Oh I remember rpmfind.net (which still exists!)

> I don't know if he was still an active developer

According to Wikipedia he died in 2015:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock

I think the parent was wondering before they passed.

The use of "was" in the parent as opposed to "is" tells you that they are already aware.

I worked closely with Ian at Progeny Linux. He wasn’t an active developer on Debian at that point in time, although he was very technically savvy.

Unfortunately, he passed away in 2016. RIP Ian.

2015, not 2016.

> 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?

Hell, Ubuntu builds it's "stable" release from Debian's testing.

Maybe just call it "next" instead of testing ?

Honestly I'd call testing stable, and stable something like "rock solid" or whatnot. Testing is for sure plenty stable for day-to-day desktop use.

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