I remember back around 2005, I missed meeting him by a ~week. My college Linux users group was having a birthday party for Debian, and Ian was an alumnus of that school, so he was going to attend. It was right before the semester started, so I was out of town.
> Debian releases
Not Debian itself.
From "A Brief History of Debian, Chapter 3 - Debian Releases" [0]:
> This was the first Debian release with a code name. It was taken, like all others so far, from a character in one of the Toy Story movies...
"Bo" was the first version of Debian that I played with. I switched to Debian "full-time" shortly after "Hamm" came about.
[0]: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releas...
My first was Debian 4. Ran it on a 550mhz PIII.
The client went away, and so did I.
Then some month ago, the client came back. The Debian 5 is still online and still running (but we plan to move on a new infra with a Buster soon).
I'm curious why were you so impressed by Debian in comparison to Ubuntu? Ubuntu is based on Debian and shares most of the mentioned features, yet your observation sounds like you experienced them as two very different systems.
The name Debian itself is a portmanteau of the names Ian Murdock (the creator of Debian) and Debra Lynn (his then-girlfriend, later ex-wife). As a result, this name has been called a curiously personal name for such a community-oriented project.[3]
I was using Fedora and Ubuntu in 2007 when a member of a local Linux User Group (LUG) introduced me to Debian. Its simplicity and elegance, its vast package repository, and its stability and robustness made me an ardent user of this distribution pretty quickly. Thirteen years later, I still use Debian on my laptops, Linode servers, and virtual machines. I run my personal website[4] on Debian too. I have got so used to "apt-get install" and the large number of tools available in the Debian repositories that I keep a Debian VM or a remote shell handy when I am working on a non-Debian system. Over these years, I have gradually moved from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 and then to Xfce 4. It really helps that Debian provides an installation CD with Xfce as the default[5]. In case anyone is interested, I have documented and shared my Debian setup notes on GitHub[6].
[1]: https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Etch_A_Sketch
[2]: https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Buster
[3]: https://archive.org/download/lud098mag/LU%26D098%20-%20Andro...
[4]: https://susam.in/
[5]: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/#i...
[6]: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/master/docs/debian-se...