All kinds of things wrong? It’s the base for half the Linux distros. What could you possibly mean?

I think they were referring to the fact that everything has something "wrong" with it, but that those things don't invalidate the value of the greater whole.

Seems to be an extremely charitable interpretation of the parent comment. I also read it as -- "Despite the plethora of issues with Debian, it manages to surprise". Like the second-level commenter, I'm also curious to hear more about these "issues".

You poor person, reading malice where none was intended.

marpstar was correct.

I am a Debian fanboi since Slink. Since it was drilled into me by rvdm, ssmeenk, miquels, jdassen and dth.

And have seen Debian survive and thrive a lot of critisism. "Too slow release cycle, not Free(Dom) enough, Too free, systemd, too much politics, too many architectures, etc....etc....etc.."

Yes, any large community will be flawed and deliver flawed solutions. And I for one celebrate those flaws and features, and appreciate the sheer magnitude and accomplishment of this enormous, complex, great project.

Gross

Reddit refugee? Grow up.

Half the Linux distris? I've once counted on Distrowatch. When you go by number of distris there it's more like 80% are Debian based.

If you go also by how much those distris are used it's even like 9x% of the stuff running out there is Debian based.

There are almost no independent distris. You have Arch, you have SUSE, you have RedHat and a few clones, you have Gentoo. But more or less everything else is Debian based.

Do I get it right that you mean > 90 percent of distro use is Debian-based? Because that can hardly be the case

Ubuntu and its derivatives are included.

Is Ubuntu still Debian based? What's the criterion for that anyway? Just using debs?

Yes, Ubuntu is still Debian based with just a little added on top.

I wouldn't call Ubuntu a flavor of Debian as they have so big differences, but ultimately it's still mostly Debian. You can see a numerical comparison of packages here: http://qa.ubuntuwire.com/mdt/all.html

Ubuntu releases are, effectively, snapshots of Debian sid every 6 months. That's a pretty strong basis.

Yes. But Red Hat, Fedora, openSUSE, SLE, Arch, Alpine, Slackware, Gentoo, NixOS are not. I have a hard time to think these represent less than 10 percent all together

And Slackware!

There are of course some niche distris that aren't based on the "big ones".

But I'm not sure Slackware is still at this point relevant enough to be named in a row with the others I've mentioned.

Of course the sampling was subjective, and I didn't intended to marginalize any not mentioned distris. I just thought the others are too niche to be included in such kind of pick.

I want to downvote you for sentimental reasons. I won't but I want to.

Do it, and tell the world how I mistreated all kinds of interesting (but small) projects, if it makes you feel better. :-D

Here a list of almost all the OS distris I've left out:

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&o...

Besides mentioning Slackware for historical reasons I should have also mentioned NixOS, which I forgot.

The former was the first Linux distri, the later gained some respectable user-base in the last years, I think.

Ah, and there is also Alpine which you can see sometimes here and there. (People using it in containers for reasons I've never understood as that's imho a recipe for trouble.)

But if you look at the rest of the list most of the stuff is really obscure. (I've tried some Solaris derivatives and Exherbo in the past but didn't even heard of all the other names.)

why is using alpine for containers a recipe for trouble?

TL;DR: It's slow and has all kinds of issues. If all you want is small containers use Distroless.

Musl is still a kind of experiment. I would not recommend running experiments in production…

Just a few random links:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312433

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musl-libc-alpines-greatest-we...

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/mu...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729342/performance-...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/70108

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080290

https://vector.dev/highlights/2020-07-09-add-musl-and-glibc-...

There are more. Much more of those!

Musl exist in large parts just for ideological reasons. It still rides some hype in industry as industry hates GPL software…

Thanks for the links. I'm just an hobbyist, but Alpine is often marketed as being great for containers. Interesting to see another perspective