Debian Celebrates 31 years!

[donald]

Bits from Debian

Debian Celebrates 31 years!
On Fri 16 August 2024 with tags debian birthday anniversary debianday
Written by Donald Norwood, Paul Wise, Justin B Rye, Debian Publicity Team
Artwork by Daniel Lenharo de Souza

Translations: pl
Debian 31 years by Daniel Lenharo

debian-31th_DLenharo_300x350.png (48.44 KiB) Viewed 21264 times

As the expression goes, "Time flies when you are having fun", meaning you do not normally account for the passage of time when you are distracted and enjoying yourself. The expression is a well established English idiom, though today for a moment the Debian Project pauses to reflect on that expression.

It has been 31 years now that we have been around.

It has been 31 amazing years of fun and amazement in watching the world around us grow and ourselves grow into the world.

Let us tell you, we have had a great time in doing so.

We have been invited to nearly every continent and country for over 25 Debian Developer Conferences, we have contributed to the sciences with our Blends[1] distributions; we have not given up on or discounted aged hardware with Long Term Support (LTS)[2]; we have encouraged and sponsored diversity with our Outreach Programs[3]. We have contributed to exploration of this lovely planet and the vast vacuum of space[4] (where no one hears Developers scream).

There is more to what we have done but from a cursory glance, we seem to have done it all.

But we never noticed it.

Time does fly or "escape irretrievably"[5] when having a good time and making progress, though our pause at this moment is that we have also had a few moments of honest self-evaluation and reflection. Over the years the project has lost some significant loved ones who were dear to us - you may have called them Developers while we called them Friends, we called them Mentors, we hurt, we grieved, and in their memories we keep moving forward.

The course of the project has seen a few tragedies, has seen heated discourse in the public domain, has addressed and weathered concerns, and has still continually grown.

And we did that in the public sphere, because at the core this is an open project. Our code is public, our bugs and failings are public, our communications are public, our meetings are public, and our love of FLOSS is most definitely public.

And now more than ever the Debian Project realizes that the "we" that is sprinkled throughout this letter is just another way of saying: "you". You, the user, contributor, sponsor, developer, maintainer, bug squasher; all of you make the WE that is Debian. So what are WE waiting for? Lets celebrate!

Join the worldwide celebration or find an event local to you by visiting our DebianDay events page[6] - see you there!

[1] https://www.debian.org/blends

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

[3] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Outreach

[4] https://bits.debian.org/2017/04/unknown ... ebian.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempus_fugit

[6] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay/2024

[donald]

Happy Anniversary to you all!

Be kind to one another.

With Love,

-Donald

[debian01]

Wow, and it still doesn't work!

[mlauronen]

Thank you all Debian volunteers and supporters for the most stable and large Linux distribution in the world.

"simply the best Better than all the rest Better than anyone"
- Tina Turner

[arzgi]

Wow, and it still doesn't work!

What does not work? For me Debian has worked since I changed it, sometimes had to do some configuration changes, but those are minor things.

I am glad Debian still rocks!

[IT-Nerd]

Happy Anniversary Debian. Thank you for decades of desktop, laptops, servers, virtual machines, cloud instances and embedded devices that run smoothly with minimal hassle (OK secure boot is not in the list). I have been using Debian for work and entertainment for 20+ years and still think it is the gold standard for GNU distributions. Official Documentation needs tidying up though

[darknetmatrix]

Happy Anniversary Debian and hopefully many more years to come

[distro-nix]

Here I am: a newbie to Debian. Yet I was around when Ian launched it.
So it took me 31 years to cycle through so many of its offspring, Ubuntu, Mint and many others along my Linux journey, only to reach the sire of them all--Debian. I am sure this is my last distro.

Happy 31st birthday.

[kc1di]

A bit late to the party but Happy Anniversary!

[friendlysalmon88]

Happy Birthday to you Debian. Debian has served as the foundation for many other GNU/Linux distributions, like Ubuntu or Antix. Conical the cooperate interest behind Ubuntu has commercialized their repsin and kind of mutilated the principals behind GNU/Linux and the GPL series of software licenses.

[oui]

I am sorry, but I can't celebrate the 31th y of Debian as a lucky year. It is a terrible year as Debian this y. close the 32 bits activities as they are probably billions of old PC's continuing to be in use in the world mainly in poor countries not able to use 64 bits software! As Corona did make the world to tremble there was not enough PC's available in schools and organizations for poor people self in rich countries like Germany! I would propose that this forum opens a new section for "Deprecated Debian solutions" . It is not fair simply to say "tomorrow nothing more, look yourself how to save yourself!". This is disgusting, I am sorry

[oui]

For those having the same problem as I (install Debian 32 bits also in the future):

There is a good ISO from Debian 12.7 EDU available through the official Debian site with the size of ab. 3808 MB having the name debian-12.7.0-i386-DVD-1.iso, perhaps the last one in 32 bits (!), working well in graphical expert install permitting to install absolutely minimal (refuse use of mirrors and demark all in tasksel) or completely for ex. with xfce4 etc (agree mirrors and select for ex. xfce4 instead of gnome if you prefere xfce4 as I do; I would use gnome if the installer would install all possible app's of gnome as abiword, epiphany, gimp, gnumeric, etc. but my (old) experience is that Debian always installs firefox-esr, libre-office etc and I find that very wrong (idem in the KDE instead of the good kde applications like calligra etc.) and reduces so terribly our scope of selection as open-office over gnome or kde = a "size monster", especially for those having weak hardware! Burn the iso on a 8 GB USB stick or card prepared as 32 bits vfat partition WITH boot flag and burn with dd (dd=if /home/.../Downloads/debian-12.7.0-i386-DVD-1.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress if the place of your used usb (gparted can inform you!) is REALLY sdb!). It is fresh meat for many years for you...

[sunrat]

Burn the iso on a 8 GB USB stick or card prepared as 32 bits vfat partition ...

Just have to chime in here as I have seen this advice a few times and it is not correct. If you dd or cp an image file to a device it will wipe out any partition already present.

[oui]

oh, yes, you are right: I did forget the important declaration in my text

Burn the iso on a 8 GB USB stick or card prepared as 32 bits vfat partition WITH boot flag and burn with dd (dd=if /home/.../Downloads/debian-12.7.0-i386-DVD-1.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress if the place of your used usb (gparted can inform you!) is REALLY sdb!) and you can start the real installation with this usb key!