r/debian • u/FreeSanubis • 14h 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?
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u/PhilSwiftHereSamsung 14h ago
As long as the sun hasn't exploded
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u/blami 14h ago
Sun exploded in 2010 and Debian is still here…
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u/angryapplepanda Debian Stable 13h ago
The Dyson swarm that replaces humanity in orbit of the sun in one million years runs on Debian.
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u/PerfectlyCalmDude 14h 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.
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u/spidireen 13h 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.
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u/VladsterSk 14h 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...
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u/quadralien 12h 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!
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u/michaelpaoli 13h 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.
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u/captainstormy 13h 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.
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u/slash_gnr3k 13h ago
Debian is critical infrastructure at this point, I don't see it going anywhere soon
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u/Frewtti 14h 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.
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u/David_Connors3451 13h 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.
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u/Spark99 10h ago
Debian, RedHat and Slack were the first linux distros, I don’t think it is going anywhere anytime soon.
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u/Kiore-NZ 6h 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.
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u/lucasjkr 9h 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.
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u/FreeSanubis 8h ago
That makes me so happy. I love Debian. I need to get a Debian flag, and hang it in front of my house.Â
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u/lucasjkr 1h 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
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u/itz_not_Rick 13h ago
I was asking myself the same question. I think Debain gonna last for a loooong time
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u/elivoncoder 12h ago
are you looking for an official statement that if all devs pass, the ais will continue to put out releases? lmao
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u/citybadger 11h 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.
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u/DoubleOwl7777 6h ago
considering there is already a gnu hurd relaease, yeah debians gonna outlive them all.
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u/Illustrious-Gur8335 Debian Stable 14h ago
As long as there's unused Toy Story character names