Getting Worried About Linux
By Daniel Miessler on September 24th, 2006: Tagged as Debian | Geek | Gentoo | Linux
So I’m getting a little freaked out lately. I keep hearing that both the Gentoo and Debian projects are in trouble.
I haven’t researched how much truth there is to these claims, but I’m getting bothered that I keep hearing the same thing over and over. What would I do if these projects were to die off or become unstable? I suppose I’d just huddle up into a ball.
I really don’t know what my alternative would be. I’m sure something would rise up and fill the gap, but I can’t see anything having the strength of community that the Gentoo and Debian projects have. To me, the death of these two projects would be the death of Linux.
I’m sure I’d snap out of it eventually and adopt whatever technical distro rose from the ashes (probably some sort of fork), but I can’t help but think that I’d be put off of Linux for quite a while. I really hope these rumors are greatly exaggerated; I love OS X, but I can’t see doing my day to day technical work without Linux.
And by that I mean not Redhat or SuSE. I’m sure those are great distros to some people, but I have no tolerance for versioned Linux. Requiring a hard upgrade to get new packages just isn’t morally sound, in my opinion.

if your worried about your distro dying roll your own … linux from scratch is an incredible way to roll your own.
Comment by Jason Ormes — 9/24/2006 @ 9:44 pm
This is quite distressing news. Gentoo’s got a good thing going on, and Debian is used as a base for several good distros (like Ubuntu).
There’s always Slackware. During my time at Tech, if you were a linux geek you either had a debian box or a slackware box. A few had rehat or mandrake (that was back when it was called mandrake), but those people were often laughed at.
Comment by Tim — 9/24/2006 @ 10:17 pm