Does Debian really have 15,000 programs available?

newbiesforever · 11-06-2009, 04:33 PM

While doing a research report in 2006, I read that Debian had at least 15,000 programs available. 15,000? Are there any caveats I should be aware of when considering that?

AlucardZero · 11-06-2009, 04:57 PM

http://www.debian.org/

Quote:

Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 25000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

Code:

alucard@karrde:~$ wget http://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz
--2009-11-06 17:57:06--  http://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz
Resolving packages.debian.org... 87.106.64.223, 128.31.0.49, 2001:8d8:81:1520::1
Connecting to packages.debian.org|87.106.64.223|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 540427 (528K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `allpackages?format=txt.gz'

100%[==========================================================>] 540,427      707K/s   in 0.7s

2009-11-06 17:57:07 (707 KB/s) - `allpackages?format=txt.gz' saved [540427/540427]

alucard@karrde:~$ file allpackages\?format\=txt.gz
allpackages?format=txt.gz: gzip compressed data
alucard@karrde:~$ gunzip allpackages\?format\=txt.gz
alucard@karrde:~$ wc -l allpackages\?format\=txt
28255 allpackages?format=txt

I'd say it has more than 15k.

MBybee · 11-06-2009, 05:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by newbiesforever

While doing a research report in 2006, I read that Debian had at least 15,000 programs available. 15,000? Are there any caveats I should be aware of when considering that?

Yes - some of them are extremely narrowly focused. There are, for example, quite a few that are for HAM radio operators, just to lob something out there.

Other times the programs are more like 're-implementations' of the same thing, one version in GTK, one that supports 3D, whatever.

Actually general use apps probably something like 10,000 or so - of these, maybe 1,000 non-default apps are something you'll actually use.

25,000 is certainly a lot, and it stacks well against the astronomical amount Windows has, the difference being you could probably install 99% of these on nearly any box, and they're all free

craigevil · 11-06-2009, 06:58 PM

Debian Distro Stats on lenny... 22971 packages, 1933 maintainers, 59051 MB installed size, 20844 MB compressed size.

Debian Distro Stats on sid... 27306 packages, 2091 maintainers, 80662 MB installed size, 29716 MB compressed size.

The above is from the dpkg bot in #debian.

And thats not counting 3rd party repos like debian-multimedia.org, or the dozens of other debian repos.

newbiesforever · 11-06-2009, 07:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBybee

Yes - some of them are extremely narrowly focused. There are, for example, quite a few that are for HAM radio operators, just to lob something out there.

Other times the programs are more like 're-implementations' of the same thing, one version in GTK, one that supports 3D, whatever.

Actually general use apps probably something like 10,000 or so - of these, maybe 1,000 non-default apps are something you'll actually use.

25,000 is certainly a lot, and it stacks well against the astronomical amount Windows has, the difference being you could probably install 99% of these on nearly any box, and they're all free

Thanks, that's the kind of information I was looking for.