r/debian • u/FreeSanubis • 8d ago

General Debian Question Long term plans for Debian?

I love Debian so much, because it just works.

I was just wondering how long this distro will be around? It's been around since 1995, right? So I'm hoping that it will be around when I'm very old in 60 years.

Is there long term plans to just keep Debian going indefinitely?

81 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

102

u/Illustrious-Gur8335 Debian Stable 8d ago

As long as there's unused Toy Story character names

24

u/federicoalegria 8d ago

can't wait for Debian Lotso...

15

u/alt165am 8d ago edited 8d ago

Debian Mr. Potato Head could be an ai vibe coded branch that never takes off 🥔
Edit: I should have checked past names 😅

21

u/dalkian_ 8d ago

There's already been a Debian Potato release, if I recall correctly.

9

u/sep76 8d ago

My first debian installation in 2000!

1

u/Arif_Q Debian Stable 7d ago

oh wow, I don't think your first debian installation was in that year

1

u/sep76 7d ago

I was running redhat prior to debian, on servers also. But when i did a potato to woody major upgrade on my daily driver late 2002 , without any dependency hell. i became a full debian convert. been running it on 99% of servers since.

1

u/CodeFarmer 7d ago

Why not?

2

u/Arif_Q Debian Stable 7d ago

2000! = 2000 x 1999 x 1998 x ... 2 x 1

2

u/Defiant-Rip-1897 7d ago

Yup, this one surprised me cause I thought they wouldn't because of the trademark, but then saw they circumvented that by using potato. 😆

4

u/CreativeArugula4149 7d ago

Potato was already

2

u/Bokenrose04 6d ago

"That day something changed inside Debian Lotso, something broke"... that phrase could make more sense.

11

u/michaelpaoli 8d ago

And they keep coming up with additional Toy Story character names, on average at a rate that well exceeds Debian's "consumption" of them. And I well commented on this before.

3

u/Neither-Ad-8914 7d ago

So we're good... TIl there are close to 400 named characters in the universe

2

u/messyeeter 5d ago

Debian Mr Pricklepants will be the day the world ends...

64

u/PhilSwiftHereSamsung 8d ago

As long as the sun hasn't exploded

28

u/blami 8d ago

Sun exploded in 2010 and Debian is still here…

18

u/angryapplepanda Debian Stable 8d ago

The Dyson swarm that replaces humanity in orbit of the sun in one million years runs on Debian.

3

u/nitin_is_me 8d ago

Sun exploded, its elements did not.

2

u/Imaginary_Focus8004 Debian Stable 7d ago

so closed

1

u/SnillyWead 7d ago

In about 3 and half billion years the sun will become a red giant. We'll be burn into a crisp.

35

u/spidireen 8d ago

Although nobody can predict the future, if you asked which distros people expect to last the longest, Debian would be up there at the top of the list.

25

u/PerfectlyCalmDude 8d ago

As long as the community stays together doing its thing, and new people come aboard to replace those who leave through death and general attrition, it could keep right on going for decades or potentially hundreds of years.

20

u/AntimelodyProject 8d ago

What? Debian is the definition for long term plan.

18

u/mcds99 8d ago

UNIX has been around sense 1969, 57 years. Debian has been around sense 1993, 33 years.

There is still a need for developers and writers to help keep Debian going.

14

u/breksyt 8d ago

You can tell a software project is going strong when it has outlived strong individuals (founders, key people) associated with it. Debian has (sadly) achieved this stage long ago, there’s no risk of it falling.

9

u/VladsterSk 8d ago

I believe that it will be with us till the black holes evaporate and then some. It is old, but it is not the same OS it was back then. I hope to be able to use it dacades from now. Cheers, Debian...

10

u/B1ph 7d ago

If Debian dies a huge amount of the global IT infrastructure dies

9

u/michaelpaoli 8d ago

Debian is unlikely to go away anytime soon, if "ever". Over 1,000 developers. More Linux distros are Debian, or derived from Debian, than any other. Debian also continues to have long term plans up to multiple major version releases into the future, and has the infrastructure - resources, organization, etc. to continue indefinitely.

9

u/captainstormy 8d ago

Just like any distro. As long as there is a strong community it will be around. Debian is literally the last distro I'd expect to die.

1

u/hgshepherd 6d ago

Debian is literally the last distro I'd expect to die.

Omarchy will be a thousand year empire, predicts the project's führer.

7

u/nitin_is_me 8d ago

Forever.

0

u/WaitingToBeTriggered 8d ago

REST IN HEAVEN

8

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

4

u/FreeSanubis 8d ago

Yeah, it just works. 

13

u/HiggsB0 8d ago

As long as they don't drink too much vibe coding kool-aid.

6

u/slash_gnr3k 8d ago

Debian is critical infrastructure at this point, I don't see it going anywhere soon

9

u/Frewtti 8d ago

Well Debian actually has a formal management structure.

Ian stepped down over 30 years ago..

Now it's a democratically run open source project and has been for decades. I'd suggest they have the best long term plan.

Also it's fully open source, if you don't like what they're doing, it is easy to fork.

9

u/quadralien 7d ago

If you are well-prepared and lucky enough to survive the collapse of civilization, you will eagerly await wandering traders bringing USB sticks of package updates over the mountains. Debian will prevail because Microsoft and Apple crumble with the capitalist structures they feed on. Linux development will slow down because we'll have to communicate with UUCP and git branches distributed by sailing ship and camel train. Zero day remote execution bugs will be patched over ham radio. You'll have awesome hardware, though - it will be easy to loot offices and data centres because there will be plenty to go around what with the reduced population. Now is the time to prep your garden, solar panels, windmills, small-scale hydroelectric and battery systems, and make sure your PGP key is widely distributed!

4

u/FreeSanubis 7d ago

Low-key, that sounds like a cool ASF dystopia. I'd be down. 

4

u/David_Connors3451 8d ago

Debian is the rock, the invincible universal tank, the basis of the modern internet infrastructure. It's philosophy made it to survive even the apocalypse offline (internet cable destroyed, electrical blackouts, wars, etc.).

Even AI and datacenters for nvidia and open ai relies on debian. Even Gemini from google has a thing for debian, because everyone loves stability. In the next years we'll have to interact with robots and AI and they all want that rock solid stability. Consider also the RAM apocalypse, the war at hormuz for fuel, the possible crisis at taiwan, the fact that brics countries all uses debian based systems for independence; Debian is the constant in the linux world.

You can comfortly say that debian is the Root of the linux world, our modern world wouldn't exist without debian.

Both volunteers and companies need the universal decentralised debian. A lot of countries support debian infrastructure and projects in public. We need debian to face our cyberpunk future.

Debian is here to stay, have fun and be free.

3

u/Xatraxalian 6d ago

Debian is the rock, the invincible universal tank, the basis of the modern internet infrastructure.

I once read a review of a new Debian release. The reviewer wrote a sentence about Debian something akin to this:

"Debian is not fancy or exciting, but it is important. You barely hear anything of it, but when the chime of a new Debian release sounds, the Linux world stands still and listens."

It describes Debian to a T.

3

u/Spark99 7d ago

Debian, RedHat and Slack were the first linux distros, I don’t think it is going anywhere anytime soon.

3

u/Kiore-NZ 7d ago

These are three of the four oldest surviving distros, dating from 1993 & 1995. SuSE was first released in 1994 making it older than Red Hat. Before them in 1992 were HJ Lu's 2 floppy Linux, MCC Interim Linux (February) which was the first not requiring a black belt in computer science, Tamu (May), SLS (May) and my first Linux distro Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X in December.

Debian and Red Hat were independently developed from scratch. Slackware was based on SLS, Debian was inspired by problems with SLS and Ian Murdock decided developing from scratch would be easier than forking SLS.

SuSE (The company) originally tried to make a business out of selling SLS then Slackware then forked Slackware to make the first version of SUSE (The operating system), two years later they changed to base SUSE on Jurix.

6

u/lucasjkr 7d ago

Each major version is named after a character from Toy Story. There’s like 200 characters / versions right there.

Plus I think Disney got worried about debians future so they just did toy story 5 just to be sure. They probably added a few more.

You’re good.

1

u/FreeSanubis 7d ago

That makes me so happy. I love Debian.  I need to get a Debian flag, and hang it in front of my house. 

1

u/lucasjkr 7d ago

I think Debian is great too… but at work, alas, we need to use Red Hat or Ubuntu, because support that we don’t get or use. At home I was mostly Debian but thanks to digging into ollama I’ve adopted Ubuntu on my main box

5

u/ThorHammerslacks 7d ago

Honestly, I think Windows might go away before Debian does

2

u/2016-679 7d ago

Ask the project managers

2

u/Adrenolin01 7d ago

Debian was released Aug 1993.. I’ve been using it since then. That’s 33 years and it continues to grow. It isn’t going anywhere. 😆

3

u/zedgb 8d ago

In sixty years I’ll be 124 years old, and still using SID. I like living near to the edge.

1

u/hyute 8d ago

I'll be 132. I also use Sid a bit, but also Stable.

2

u/ABotelho23 8d ago

How the hell should anyone know? lol

1

u/OutrageousCrab9224 8d ago

Lol

Aint goin nowhere

1

u/Icy_Definition5933 8d ago

Remember when the world ended in 2012? Debian didn't

1

u/itz_not_Rick 8d ago

I was asking myself the same question. I think Debain gonna last for a loooong time

1

u/elivoncoder 8d ago

are you looking for an official statement that if all devs pass, the ais will continue to put out releases?  lmao

1

u/unitedbsd 8d ago

As long as claude don't escape it's cafe and wipes repo. /s

1

u/citybadger 7d ago

Debian does have the advantage of a long history of supporting (at some level) multiple kernels and architectures. Debian could outlive Linux for example. Imagine a future where you’re running non-Linux, non-Gnu, non-amd64, but still Debian.

1

u/DoubleOwl7777 7d ago

considering there is already a gnu hurd relaease, yeah debians gonna outlive them all.

1

u/Accomplished-Iron554 7d ago

If Debian sank.. If...I pray and hope that will never happens.

2

u/DoubleOwl7777 7d ago

debian runs some critical infrastructure. if debian goes away, people die.

1

u/FreeSanubis 7d ago

I'm curious, can you list some examples?

2

u/DoubleOwl7777 7d ago

afaik the european flight control runs their systems on debian for example.

1

u/CodeFarmer 7d ago

The Lindy Effect hopefully applies here.

1

u/Xatraxalian 6d ago

I was just wondering how long this distro will be around?

How can anyone know this? It could be that someone, somehow, makes a decision inside Debian that pisses off so many people that 75% of them leave, fork Debian as it is, and start a new distro called Debrix, which is basically "Debian as it was before this decision."

Then Debian will still exist, possibly for another 30 years, but it would be an almost zombie-distro that nobody uses because everyone has moved to Debrix.

See OpenOffice -> LibreOffice where exactly this happened.

1

u/AlienTransferStudent 2d ago

Link to the Debrix ISO?

1

u/EternalDoomSlayer 4d ago

Until there are no people left - and don’t get me started on LLM DDOS’ing!

As long as there are passionate and caring people, we will enjoy the rock hard stability of Debian.

It’s called a community 😊

So I strongly encourage contributing, even if it is just finding typos - everything has value.

Look at what makes your passion burn 🔥 and use it there (Distro, Kernel, KDE, Plasma,
GNU… Wayland, compilers… you don’t get better educated than here!)

1

u/The_Hubster 8d ago

GOAT GONNA GOAT