Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

I use Debian as my primary OS and have been doing so since 2002 onwards. I switched from Redhat to Debian because RH8 was an attempt to make the OS easier for new users which meant that a lot of functionality was no longer exposed to the user without having to jump through hoops and I just didn’t like the new look and feel anymore. After looking at the available options I switched to Debian 3.0 that had released earlier that year. It worked great for the most part for me and I have been using it since. I did explore Mint and Ubuntu for a bit in the middle but have mostly been using Debian for my home systems. (Work wise most companies I have been with have been on RHEL, CentOS and Fedora).

After running for such a long time and with the constant changes over the past few years, it is obvious to wonder how the Debian project is doing and recently Jonathan Carter who is the current Debian Project Leader sent an email giving a high level overview of the current status, what went well, the current challenges and future scope. It is an interesting read and you should check it out here: Question to all candidates: how is Debian doing?.

Some of the points I found interesting are listed below:

• The project has managed to release every 2 years since 2005
• The finances are also really good, with over $1m in available funds
• Debian gained secureboot support
• The debian.social project
• Consumer computing products are going to continue being more locked down and this is causing problems with the installers

There are more points but as Jonathan put it “I think Debian is doing ok. It’s not doing great, but it is ok. “. For me it works as I want it & how I want it so I am happy with it and it is good to know that the project is stable and will continue to be around for a while.

– Suramya