It’s well known that Linus once tried Debian, way back in 2007, and found it hard to install. One of the attendees during the Q&A session of DebConf 2014 asked if he tried it lately. The creator of Linux replied that while he didn’t give Debian a try lately he was sure that it has become much easier to install Debian.
Linus doesn’t find a distribution to be a very interesting thing. All he needs from a distribution is that it should be easy to install so that he can quickly go on to do things that he wants to do on his computer. The reason why he was not interested in a hard to install OS was, “I wanted it to be easy to install so I can get on with my life. Which is most of the kernel.”
Debian might have been a bit hard to install at one point of time, its derivative Ubuntu is known for ease of use. Did he ever try Ubuntu? The fact is he did try Ubuntu and discarded it immediately.
“I tried Ubuntu and that got nixed really fast as they made it really hard for me to install my own kernel and when make install doesn’t work for me I am like ‘whatever; I will do something else,” said Linus.
He suggests that someone at Ubuntu must look at this problem, “Someone should check that you can just do make install and you don’t have to build package and install a package. If I have to install a package and at that point if a distribution gets in my way and then at that point I will say OK I will do something else.”
One of the attendees suggested that Debian has become extremely easy to install and he should give it a try again. Linus pointed out a practical problem which is applicable to anyone else who runs multiple systems.
Linus, like many of us is not an MIS person, “I may do kernels and people think that means I am technical but when it comes to actually maintaining machines I am a complete disaster.”
I change my machines regularly so changing the system that runs on my machine would be easy and I end up upgrading my machines couple of times a years usually.
He ends up also maintaining machines of his family and that ends up being the one that I don’t upgrade my families machines that often and I don’t want to run multiple different distributions across different machines because he sucks at MIS.
““For me a distribution has to be sticky, once I started with one thing I have a really hard time to doing something else. Because that means I have to switch over all my kids machines my wifes machine and that’s just painful.”
Anyone can relate to that, it’s really hard to switch operating systems for no good reason. I used to run different operating systems on different machines, but over time it became more and more challenging to keep them updated as each OS has its own update or upgrade cycle.
So it looks like there is no possibility of Linus fort changing its distribution any time soon.
