Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Well, if Ubuntu ever stops being based on Debian, then I would agree that Debian has a problem. However, I don't see that happening in the near future. The fact that Linspire and Mepis are _indirectly_ based on Debian is to me a moot point. They are still implementations of the Debian System.
Member since:2006-01-01
It's hard to say anything definite of the usage stats of non-commercial distros. Nevertheless, it looks like most of Ubuntu's users come from somewhere else, not from Debian. It's also possible that some Ubuntu users want to check out the "mother-distro" once they've played around with Ubuntu for some time. And Debian has a solid (and well-earned) reputation as a very reliable server distro.
There's DistroWatch popularity stats that doesn't show decline in Debian's popularity:
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity
And there's the two-years old Netcraft report that shows growth for Debian:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debi...
And then there's the recent news that Hewlett-Packard makes good money by selling support for Debian. This probably wouldn't be possible if there weren't a lot of people using Debian. ;-)
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3661481
Member since:
2006-06-26
What exactly happens at the moment? There are "nice" distributions that used to be based on Debian - well, they are now based on Ubuntu. So this "reference implementation" thing is somewhat fading away ...
Debian _is_ a very usable system. What I mean is: Does it still attract new users? Isn't it true that Ubuntu takes away a huge chunk - even now with Dapper for servers? And isn't Ubuntu on its way to substitute Debian (tho somewhat impossible since it's based on Debian itself)?