When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing. (When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages, in a way that now seems naive and reckless: "https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/#software".)
The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need, so I still get the APT experience. (I even got the closed Nvidia CUDA stack from Debian Stable `non-free` repos, the other day, and it just worked. Maybe a little too easily and well, but that's another matter.)
At times it's missing something I want but usually Debian stable is all I need. I don't use unstable or backports: typically I either use Debian stable or I compile from source (like Emacs).
Last little hiccup recently is the lack of support for JPEG XL in the latest ImageMagick shipped with Debian stable (if I'm not mistaken), so I'd need to compile it from source (haven't done it yet but it's on my todo list: I want to recompile "losslessly" all my JPG to JPEG XL).
I think a lot of people you came to Linux later don't fully realise how revolutionary apt was back then.
I can still remember the pain of manually downloading rpms only to find it needed another one installed first or wasn't version compatible with something else etc.
They tried, I guess.
I recently had to reinstall Win11. I don't use it, but I needed to keep it around.
Windows Update does not update packages from the Windows Store, or vice versa.
Aside from the dozens of external driver packages you need, and even using Ninite to get a basic set of working apps, you still need 2 totally separate tools to update Windows.
It says a lot about how bad Linux on the desktop still is today that some poor misled fools still think that Win11 plus WSL2 is a better Linux than Linux.
Can Windows install the Visual C++ runtimes yet?
To this day, I still don’t quite get why so much of #linux was still using Red Hat at the time. Nat, miguel, the GNOME guys; the kernel guys; the storage guys.
Oh I remember rpmfind.net (which still exists!)
According to Wikipedia he died in 2015:
Testing is pretty stable for something named "testing" and unstable is remarkably stable for something called stable. Well, except that one month every 2 years after release where all that was frozen for release gets unfrozen..
And it being stable is not only important feature. The upgrades just work, better than in any other distro I tested (unless you make frankendebian but even then surprisingly often it also "just works". Slap unattended-upgrades package with some settings and you can basically forget it if it is just some service
How many people installed debian stable and bounced off because all the packages were quite old?
Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the most convenient drag&drop sharing site.
> Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at different companies, would have been interesting to hear his reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders as far as I know.