The first time I installed Debian - it was 2013. On a Windows machine. As a virtual machine. I think it was Debian 7 as it had recently been released, but I am not sure about that. I hated its looks because it comes with default software and usually an older version. And I have always sincerely, whole-heartedly hated gnome’s default icon set (I don’t know what it is called and I never bother changing it).
If I remember correctly, that particular version of Debian had some issues with KDE and I was stuck with Gnome. And since I started using that VM as my primary dev machine for the work I was doing at that time, I was stuck.
Quite surprisingly, this VM was super duper stable. I mean as long as host machine and the virtualizer were working fine, this machine refused to crash. It was hard to make it even slow down. It was the first time I got attracted to an OS like that. It was like this OS was obsessed with stability.
With time, again and again, I kept on going back to Debian. By 2021 I was hooked. I installed this thing on my spare laptop. I was overlooking Ubuntu, my previous favorite because Ubuntu felt clumsy, slow, overloaded with slow UI and bad choices (did that feel like a snap? I meant it!).
When I bought a second hand laptop just for its RAM size (and it was coming in at low cost), I chose debian. This laptop came in to serve as a caching server for something I was working on (needed a lot of RAM). That project got done, the experiments did not conclude and the laptop ended up as muy secondary machine. It ran Debian 12. I recently upgraded that to Debian 13. Thing works flawlessly.
Love
Most people do not want to break things that work. Surprisingly, most don’t care to break a word down to pieces and understand the construction of a word. Most people I ask the “base” word of embedding can’t tell that it is bed with em as prefix and (d)ing as the suffix.
Once you are in love with something or someone, you typically want to learn more about it or them. Same happened to me regarding debian. I wanted to learn about its origins. And in there I found something I cannot unsee now.
Debian, the famous .deb packaging format, popularized by its derivatives like Ubuntu and Mint, the rock solid dependency resolution mechanism built into apt, its image of rock solid stability and all of what it stands of is made of “love”. You see, Deb ian is made of two words:
Ian: Stands for the name of its original creator - Ian MurdockDeb: Stands for the name of his then-girlfriend, later his wife - Debra Lynn
Debian, in a sea of Linux distributions that want to pose with “I got the latest software pacakages” stands out with “I got the most stable, most reliable software packages” motto. That is love poured into the craft of making an Operating System that wants to tell you: “Don’t worry. You do your work and I am there to help you, to take care of things you can’t - the hardware.”
Reminds me of the famous line we Indians learn via scriptures early in life: “Work is worship”. It is like someone poured devotion into this OS.
Devotion poured into an Operating System
I have been using computers since 20 years now. I have used many versions of Windows, macOS (OS X) and Linux (various distros) on desktop, laptops, servers installed directly as well as Virtual Machine, accessing these locally as well as remotely.
Debian remains the only OS to this date in my journey of 20 years that I don’t remember crashing. Not once in 20 years.
Ever!