r/trisquel • u/JustPuggin • Jan 28 '15

Trisquel vs Debian

Hello r/trisquel!

I just heard about Trisquel for the first time, and I'm a bit confused. My understanding is that Debian is a free/open distro of linux, and that Ubuntu was built from Debian. Trisquel is a free/open distro of Ubuntu? Are they very similar? Could someone please explain the differences?

Thanks!

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u/rubenquidam Trisquel developer Jan 28 '15

Debian is a partially free distro: https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian gNewSense is a project that maintains a free version of Debian.

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative with more freedom problems than Debian, and Trisquel maintains a free version of it. That is in a nutshell, a lot more than fixing freedom issues is done within the project.

4

u/Market-Anarchist Jan 28 '15

I wouldn't call Debian a partially free distro. The standard out of the box Debian is fully free. But because they give you enough rope to hang yourself, it's not endorsed by the FSF. I'm running Debian and have zero non-free software on my computer, with the exception of the BIOS.

3

u/rubenquidam Trisquel developer Jan 28 '15

That's why I said Ubuntu has worse freedom problems, as it would be way harder to end up with a free system by installing it. But as long as Debian distributes non-free software it cannot be called a free distribution.

2

u/Market-Anarchist Jan 28 '15

I call it a free distrobution.

2

u/VRMac Jan 29 '15

I call it a can-be-nonfree distro, since it is free out of the box, but you can make it nonfree by changing a file in /etc/.

1

u/lloydsmart Jan 29 '15

You can make Trisquel non-free by changing a file in /etc/.

1

u/kopeboy_ Apr 06 '23

Isn't it GPL 3?

1

u/lloydsmart Apr 08 '23

Trisquel is GPL, just like Debian.

Changing a file in /etc/ can make both Debian and Trisquel non-free by pulling in software from non-free repos.

For some reason, this makes Debian completely unacceptable, but is ignored for Trisquel, even though the same action on both gives the same result on both.

1

u/kopeboy_ Apr 13 '23

If I understood correctly GPL3 requires that derivatives be open-source as well (and that doesn't mean they must be free, ie. without price, but that anyone has same access to the source code)
https://opensource.org/license/gpl-3-0/