Published at LXer:

The latest Debian Project News recently announced a code freeze in preparation for a new release by the end of 2010. It's a sign of the times that the news went mostly unreported. Which makes me wonder: What is Debian's role today?

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I'll have you know that anything that can run on Debian can run on the world's most popular distro, Ubuntu.

That's hardly surprising, since Ubuntu is derived from Debian.

We'll just see how 'popular' Ubuntu stays if Debian goes under. Ubuntu owes a whole lot to Debian, and still bases most of itself (if not all) off the Debian branch.

Software distributions based on Debian
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros

Debian has been in the top 10 distros on distrowatch.com for several years.

Debian isn't going any where, if it did dozens of distros would vanish. Including Ubuntu and all of its derivatives, Mepis, Crunchbang, sidux, Knoppix, Kanotix and all the other distros based on Debian.

Well I can't help but toot the Slackware horn but it was derived from SLS, and that did go under, but Slackware is the exception to the rule, because Slackware is the rule.

Hasn't Debian's increasing irrelevance been talked about since Ubuntu became popular? And yet it's still around. Obviously someone had nothing better to write about. Debian is a workhorse distro, like Slackware. It just carries on and doesn't make a fanfare. We don't need advertising campaigns every time a distro updates, this is Linux not Windows or Apple.

And, like Slackware, it is released when it's ready. Unlike Ubuntu, which is let out of its cage before it's tame.

I think these kinds of people that read/write these kinds of articles really don't understand the power and idea behind Debian (and Slackware), and perhaps are really confused/annoyed/bothered/etc that distros such as Debian and Slackware in their view 'just tend to linger on,' so to speak.

If the distro is in no way flashy, and does not offer them the glitz and 'bleeding edge' features (that often cause more problems than it's worth), then these distros are written off and assume that sooner or later most if not all users would have abandoned the distros, and only illogical 'cult' users would really use such a distro.

It would probably also be assumed by such people that not only Slackware, but Debian are too difficult to use and more 'current' distros have pretty much removed any need/reason to use such a distro.

I tend to think of it perhaps more like a fruit: Not quite ripe yet, and can usually leave a sour and or bitter taste after. Or like a pot roast. 'Put it back in the oven, because it just isn't ready yet.' Or (insert_whatever_food_or_other_analogy_here.)

An undercooked chicken that gives you food-poisoning.

What I would love to see is an Ubuntu-like GUI/splash screen in a distro based on Arch... That way, everybody's happy.

Can someone please explain to me what the fascination with splash screens is? I'll take a Slackware or Debian that are stable to the point that I might see a boot screen once a month, and usually just because I got the electric bill........

The fact that most newbies don't like looking at "cryptic" boot logging that gets displayed when there's no splash screen.

Yet the irony in that statement is that they would be looking at the messages again later, when they have to dmesg and view startup logs anyways, when they are asked to post messages when something doesn't load.

I would much rather 'see' the 'cryptic messages' and see what is being loaded, and what fails at startup, without having to later figure out that something 'borked' and have to hunt it down later.

To me anyways, the whole 'splash screen' is akin to the notion of 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,' 'ignorance is bliss,' etc.

Anyways, a lot of it is not all that cryptic. Hell even back in the days of Windows running on top of DOS, 'newbies' got pretty much a taste of DOS startup messages and such. Also Win95/98, all you had to do was hit 'esc' and the 'splash' would give way to DOS spitting out messages of what it was doing while loading Windows.

The whole notion of splash screens on startup is rather misguided, quaint, overrated, and holds no real value.

I do this, too. I haven't bothered with setting up a boot splash on any of my systems, because a) I'm lazy (), and b) I like to see exactly what's going on as the machine boots up (well, okay, the initial kernel diagnostic output scrolls too fast to be seen , but the init scripts' output is fairly readable).