Why Debian?

[maverickws]

Hi all,

I'm sorry as this is my first topic. I've been hearing a lot of buzz around Proxmox and decided to give it a try.
As I proceeded for install I realised Proxmox is Debian based. But as I see it, Proxmox is an expensive packaging of KVM and a couple of open-source tools, of which, coincidentally, are maintained by RedHat.

Also, I don't see much Debian used for enterprise applications. I mean enterprise, not new kids on the block labs because they were hit with the ubuntu hype and all of the sudden think that's linux. I see ubuntu a lot with low-quality developers and container projects.

Are the Proxmox developers core maintainers on any of the packaged projects?

Being enterprise applications mostly ran on RHEL/CentOS and SUSE, why the strong bet on Debian?

Imho these are the decisions that make a project stick around after the hype is gone and as technology matures. The virtualisation market will evolve and new competitors will show up, and others will fail. Debian does not have even half knowledge or dimension of Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS community, nor it has a major corporation pouring money on development to attain performance and stability. Even apt is years behind the deceased yum which is being replaced with dnf.

So, I have two questions:

1. Anyone can explain why the bet on this OS;
2. Will people at Proxmox get this and eventually release RHEL/CentOS distros or is this out of their reach?

If even the folks at BigBlueButton made it to RHEL/CentOS after complaints, I'm sure you guys can make it too.

 

[dietmar]

1. Anyone can explain why the bet on this OS;

* Debian is committed to open source and community based (totally independent)
* Debian is extremely stable and has a large package base
* IMHO, the package system is technically superior to rpm based systems

2. Will people at Proxmox get this and eventually release RHEL/CentOS distros or is this out of their reach?

no plans.

Beside, you can run RHEL/CentOS and SUSE as VMs.

 

[mir]

I'm sorry as this is my first topic. I've been hearing a lot of buzz around Proxmox and decided to give it a try.
As I proceeded for install I realised Proxmox is Debian based. But as I see it, Proxmox is an expensive packaging of KVM and a couple of open-source tools, of which, coincidentally, are maintained by RedHat.

Also, I don't see much Debian used for enterprise applications. I mean enterprise, not new kids on the block labs because they were hit with the ubuntu hype and all of the sudden think that's linux. I see ubuntu a lot with low-quality developers and container projects.

With statements like this it is also obviously that you are new to Linux ;-)

 

[maverickws]

* Debian is committed to open source and community based (totally independent)
* Debian is extremely stable and has a large package base
* IMHO, the package system is technically superior to rpm based systems

- Oh is Debian committed to open source and the community?
What contributions has "Debian" made to the Open-Source community exactly?
Beside taking a decade years to adopt systemd etc?
I am really asking you know? Because Red Hat is a major open-source contributor. Red Hat has their hand in more than half the packages that make proxmox work. Even Apple contributes more to the open-source community than "Debian" (whomever that is). But I am really very interested in knowing about these contributions.
- Stable? Debian is as stable as Fedora. Red Hat is stable. CentOS is stable
- LOL. LOL. LOL. Package system is superior!
apt is like something that came out of an 90's movie. But I understand that the lack of experience with RHEL systems makes someone think this and even believe its true.
Btw how is it that you undo an apt installation and return to previous state? Oh, you can't?
How do you list the history of yum commands? Oh there's no command to see the history?
Wait, dkpg and apt don't track the installation date? oh man it really is a "superior" to rpm based systems. Oh man now I see it, apt is so far ahead!
No, really. Yum, which is way better than apt, and is being superseded by dnf, which means what it means. Its easy.
Other things, Yum automatically refreshes the list of packages, apt requires two commands to do a simple thing like updating. I mean... its so much better right? I have no words for how "superior" this package system is.

no plans.

Beside, you can run RHEL/CentOS and SUSE as VMs.

I think you missed the point here. Maybe a good exercise would be... I don't know... maybe do some digging about major corportations that use Debian vs RH could do you some good.
I'm talking about having a solid robust reliable OS underneath, not virtualized. Many of the issues I've been seeing here on the forums are related to issues that can be tracked back to the OS implementation.

With statements like this it is also obviously that you are new to Linux ;-)

Yes! Completely new. I mean, how do you do a "dir" command on linux? :<

------------------

In my view the debian people are like those guys that rejected systemd when it was launched, talk smack about everything, yet a hefty number of years after you see it all appearing on Debian and those guys adopting it obviously. They're the guys who said would never use systemd, but here we are today:
- systemd
- journald
- iproute2
- firewalld
- SE Linux, I guess its too hard for folks at Proxmox to learn to play nice with SELinux, because you know, SELinux is a security hazard
- ...

This thread reminded me of a guy I saw on an IRC channel a while back crying that his system had died after some upgrade, because UUID's were complicated and disabled it entirely. Man you gotta love these people.

From the High Availability stack, to Storage (LVM, Ceph) to anything really there is ONE common player and has little to do with debian.
By the way, what was the participation of "Debian" or "Debian community" on purchasing, lets say for example the GFS file system, LVM2 and associated clustering tools from Sistina software for 31 million dollars in 2003 and releasing it to the open-source community?

One of the main issues of Linux grand-adoption are vendors like these here at Proxmox who lack vision and even knowledge (and often become late adopters and are unease with technologies as they are ported and make it into stables and became default) so they insist in software that's consumer grade. Major players know the money is on companies. Major players know only a handful of companies will be running Debian as a main linux distro. Most will never do it. (easily confirmed by the corporate user base).
Major players make their software available to more than one platform. They realize big corporate clients have money to invest on development, and they put money into it, so they want to be working with them. That is why RHEL is used on most servers around the world and a major contributor to open-source, and Debian is not.
Debian's view on open-source is "we're a community yay, answer to no one yay, let's use the open-source software the big corps made anyway but say not", like, is the Debian community a leader contributor of Gnome? Oh no, wait.. again that's red hat.
Do you even have a slightest idea of how much Linux software and libs are MAINTAINED by Red Hat after all these years? like glibc, gcc, autoconf, libuser, libxml2, gnulib, M4, up2date, anaconda, mkinitrd, ntsysv (you know who wrote it?) ....

well, you get the picture.

The "no plans" stance was very elucidative regarding direction. Thank you

But still, I give you an offer. Red Hat has "now" (like, 4 years) a free subscription.
Knock your self out: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/

But anyway, CentOS is more than enough. Red Hat is Open Source, you only pay repository subscription for updates. With CentOS you pay nothing, and is the same. Red Hat puts effort to all these tools and makes them open-source, most of them make it years later to debian based systems.

 

[LnxBil]

Major players know only a handful of companies will be running Debian as a main linux distro.

Yeah, Google for example that moved away from RedHat to Debian ...

 

[maverickws]

Yeah, Google for example that moved away from RedHat to Debian ...

That was a nice read. Really.
But then you go back to the first page where you read:

- Eventually, they all got reinstalled with Red Hat 7.1

Also, Google like Red Hat make their own distros and use their own distros, mostly at desktop level where many use Fedora and in Google they are keen for Debian stuff it is publicly known. Afaik, on desktops. Period.
Google is a major open-source contributor. Is a billion dollar company that pours shitloads of money on developers that develop open-source, that develop things that work all across Red Hat systems. Usually better and with more stability than on other systems.



The whole article is about the abandonment of an outdated system. The Debian exercise was fun there, great to take to Linuxcon, then they went back to operations and installed the real deal.
And I actually relate to this:

For those of you who have tried running apt-get/dpkg/rpm/yum on thousands of servers, you may have found that random failures, database corruptions (for rpm) due to reboots/crashes during updates, and other issues make this not very reliable.

God knows how this is true. In 2000.
Yum and rpm's have come a really long way, and today yum (that will become deprecated) is a wonderful piece of software. It no longer relates to that sentence AT ALL. While apt still feels like 2010.

What are the great open-source contributions of that Debian community, support or even proven reliability on top-tier computing centers that makes this business decision look like a good one? (and I don't even mean doing it on Debian, but not having a rhel/centos/fedora version. that is shortsighted). The Linux world has some flexibility on people using their own linux, that doesn't mean people or companies have to do things that only work on their distro of choice. That's the business decision you can take from everyone else in the market.

 

[t.lamprecht]

But then you go back to the first page where you read:

Eventually, they all got reinstalled with Red Hat 7.1

I mean don't feed the troll and all that, but you do realize they do not talk about RHEL but the original RH 7.1 from the 90s?
Google is still using Debian for almost everything internally. They never went back to RH.
https://itsfoss.com/goobuntu-glinux-google/

FYI: You're free to use RHEL if you prefer that, so if you want just please do so, as Proxmox Projects will stay on Debian.

 

[maverickws]

I mean don't feed the troll and all that, but you do realize they do not talk about RHEL but the original RH 7.1 from the 90s?
Google is still using Debian for almost everything internally. They never went back to RH.
https://itsfoss.com/goobuntu-glinux-google/

Yes ofc, RHEL 7 is from 2015, so it would be hard to install RHEL 7.1 in 2013. Only around 2010 they made way from Fedora.
Google doesn't use Debian.
Google uses gLinux, which is derived from Debiantesting, and again, afaik they only use it on workstation and development level. Google uses their own distributions for production as well, their own GWS Google Web Server that they affirmed in the past is not derived of Apache or any other open-source project and their software stack is mostly developed in-house.

So saying they use Debian may be cute for those that follow technology like religion. They have the money and work power to develop their own distros, that are not open-source nor publicly available (some things are, many more are not). They take Debian and say "holly shit son, you need a nice bath, an haircut and get some food." so they fix it up with their hefty paid engineers and use it with the stability that lacked.

I have nothing against what other people use as their Linux. Doing stuff that only works on your linux distro is good if you're Google, yet they do many open-source tools available to us all on all systems.
And whatever Linux Google uses, they work closely with Red Hat and both work on open-source products that work on both OS's. That's the open-source commitment, to make things available to the Linux community, not the distro you fancy.

Don't use the closed gLinux of Google to say they use Debian. I mean, you said I'm the troll right?

FYI: You're free to use RHEL if you prefer that, so if you want just please do so, as Proxmox Projects will stay on Debian.

I use as I please and encourage others to do the same. The shame is on the companies that want to force others to use their distro which is largely unsupported, has absolutely no official support, and relies on a community that as a community has done little contributions to the open-source software community.

 

[tom]

I use as I please and encourage others to do the same. The shame is on the companies that want to force others to use their distro which is largely unsupported, has absolutely no official support, and relies on a community that as a community has done little contributions to the open-source software community.

You mean Proxmox with this statement?

 

[maverickws]

2. Will people at Proxmox get this and eventually release RHEL/CentOS distros?

no plans.

FYI: You're free to use RHEL if you prefer that, so if you want just please do so, as Proxmox Projects will stay on Debian.

I use as I please and encourage others to do the same. The shame is on the companies that want to force others to use their distro which is largely unsupported, has absolutely no official support, and relies on a community that as a community has done little contributions to the open-source software community.

You mean Proxmox with this statement?

I mean whoever fits in that description. Does Proxmox?

 

[PigLover]

Nobody at Proxmox "forces others to use their distro". They provide a comprehensive package for a purpose. Lots of people seem to like it. It happens to be built on Debian.

If you don't want to use it you are free not to do so.

You said:
- "I use as I please": good. An expression of freedom.
- "and encourage others to do the same": also good - share what you have learned. Sharing is good.

But you become a troll when you come to a place like this and start trashing what they have achieved just because you would have made different choices.

Generally I believe that the forums should be pretty free and open. But this is a thread that very few would object to being closed and locked.

 

[maverickws]

Nobody at Proxmox "forces others to use their distro". They provide a comprehensive package for a purpose. Lots of people seem to like it. It happens to be built on Debian.

If you don't want to use it you are free not to do so.

You said:
- "I use as I please": good. An expression of freedom.
- "and encourage others to do the same": also good - share what you have learned. Sharing is good.

But you become a troll when you come to a place like this and start trashing what they have achieved just because you would have made different choices.

Generally I believe that the forums should be pretty free and open. But this is a thread that very few would object to being closed and locked.

I have searched exhaustively on this before opening this topic these are legitimate questions about a decision that looks like its set in stone. My question isn't even in the means of "change the distro you work on" lol is more of "hey why aren't you guys like any other vendor that support more than one distro officially".

I haven't trashed anything achieved. I really would appreciate that you show me where that trashing is. rofl.
But anyway, I opened this thread with a purpose and I have achieved it by now.

No one was able to give me a good answer, a good argument, about the Debian decision. The closest to it was "google uses something based off debian" and "debian is guuud". the package manager "is better" but lacks the simplest things like time tracking, history, undos and a bunch of other things. Its a decade behind on package managers, but there's always someone prone to say its the next best thing. Sure.
The lack of sympathy from the staff here, that simply rejects making a rpm, and completely dismiss it, is really very elucidative about the kind of company this is btw.

Thankfully there are very few companies that do it like this. All the major softwares from open-source have installers for most common distros. I remember a couple from 2000 to 2005 that had the same idea as Proxmox folks here, but they all disappeared eventually, and their software parts acquired by others.

 

[PigLover]

But why do you care? You stated your belief that Proxmox is just an " an expensive packaging of KVM and a couple of open-source tools". You've trashed on their choice to make it Debian based (despite your denials - yes, you came here to trash talk them). Its clear you have no desire to use it.

So - really - why do you care? What value to you add by these comments? Others are quite happy with Proxmox as is and it is thriving both as an open source project and as a business.

Please stop trolling.

 

[tom]

No one was able to give me a good answer, a good argument, about the Debian decision.

You got an answer from one of the founders of Proxmox, but it looks like you are not interested in reading and understanding.

You are free to post here, but this forum is about "Proxmox VE Installation and Configuration" only.

Thread closed.