this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Plain ol Debian
I've been using it on servers for over 20 years. It's a great distro.
It's a community project. Every member of the Debian project has equal rights and vote on major decisions. It's not owned by a large company so it's mostly avoided any controversy due to bad decisions (for comparison, see the controversy around CentOS Stream).
They mostly don't change things if they work fine as-is. The network configuration in
/etc/network/interfacesis essentially the same format as it was 20 years ago. (for comparison, see Ubuntu deciding to change how it does things every few years). Probably the biggest recent change was switching to systemd in 2015, but even today they have a compatibility layer to convert packages with sysvinit-style services to systemd, and you can still switch back to sysvinit and completely get rid of systemd.You can upgrade to the next version in-place - just edit the apt repository config to point to the next version,
apt update,apt full-upgrade, and reboot into new kernel version. Most upgrades are seamless (but it's still best to read the release notes).Most packages include a
README.Debianfile in /usr/share/docs somewhere that usually includes very brief instructions on how to get started with the program.It supports practically every system architecture. They still make an i686 build that works with processors as old as the Pentium 4. They also had an i386 build that worked on systems as old as the original Pentium, and only dropped it this year with Debian 12. Supporting an architecture doesn't just mean the base OS - it also includes most of the packages too.
What I love about Debian is there are always instructions regardless of whatever random package I want to use or Linux thing I’m trying to do.
@dan what is the name of the distro.please tell me I am switching to Linux from windows and I don't want to use Ubuntu.
I'm talking about Debian :)
been thinking about moving on from Pop_OS and doing the usual looking around – was going to be a toss up between NixOS, Void, Alpine, and Debian Sid – but recently caught Veronica Explains talking about Debian and realizing enough with all the noise – simple, stable, boring, ubiquitous sounds REALLY appealing …
Using it over years and discovered the expert installer a few months ago. Really good stuff, especially since they decide to build an extra repo for non-free-firmware, because a lot of people ditch Debian when their shitty WiFi doesn't get recognized immediately after install because it needs a non-free-firmware.