Re: Debian is a dying project.

Debian is a dying project. (Score: -1, Troll)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-01 02:17 (#2T19)

Debian is a dying project. It is like Mozilla and GNOME. Once, a long time ago, they were all relevant. But then they started to crap all over their users. That's one thing that an open source project or organization of any type cannot do: crap on its users. These users have ample choice. They will leave. Disgruntled Debian users have already moved to Gentoo and FreeBSD. Disgruntled Firefox users have moved to Chrome. Disgruntled GNOME users have moved to KDE and Xfce. I don't even think that Debian, Mozilla or GNOME can redeem themselves. Their names have become synonymous with getting crapped on. Soon their names will be synonymous with complete and utter failure.

Re: Debian is a dying project. (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-01 03:16 (#2T1B)

The parent makes some good points, and should be modded up.

I've been looking at the stats for my web sites lately, and over the past four years Firefox's usage has totally dropped off, while Chrome's has gone through the roof. This is consistently the case no matter which of my sites I look at, and even when I isolate the stats to specific geographical regions, or periods of time, or other such groupings.

Linux distros can die, too. Just look at Mandrake. It was once really popular. I think it was even at the top of DistroWatch's popularity list at one point. But now it's a has-been that is used by very few people. The same could happen to Debian.

When I look at my sites' stats and see Firefox go from 35% four years ago down to 7% today, while Chrome goes from 10% to 56% over the same time period, I think it's clear which project is dying and which is thriving. Hint: it's Firefox that's dying.

Re: Debian is a dying project. (Score: 2, Interesting)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-01 05:12 (#2T1C)

The numbers tell a different story. Chrome's market-share can only minimally be at the expense of Firefox... i.e. Chrome is more popular now than Firefox EVER was, and Firefox hasn't fallen dramatically off of it's brief highs... Instead Chrome's incredible popularity is almost entirely at the expense of Internet Explorer. So, if something is "dying" it's Internet Explorer. And yet, none of them are for-profit works, so 100% or 1% market share is all the same, and it's unlikely that any of them will "die." Getting caught-up in the market-share horse-race is a fool's errand that does no good for anyone.

With Debian, the claim it is dying is even more ridiculous. There's really no distro out there, free of systemd, that has a snowball's chance in hell of getting corporate adoption. Companies are never going to build their own Gentoo systems, and hardware/software markers would never support it. Whatever complaints you may have against Debian does not translate into it dying, or even losing the slightest bit of market share. If someone has some numbers, showing Gentoo or FreeBSD overtaking Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat/Suse, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, the claim is just an utterly and totally ridiculous and laughable bit of trolling.

A bit ironic, I know, as it's FreeBSD that's supposed to be "dying"...

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