How is Ubuntu based on Debian?
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on Debian. Like this, there are several other linux distributions that are based on Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, etc. What confuses me is what does this mean i.e one Linux distro based on some other. How they are made?
@Zenklys — this is not a duplicate. I don’t want to know the difference between Debian and Ubuntu. What I want to know is how is one distro based on some other distro. I have taken Ubuntu and Debian as an example only to tell what I am trying to ask.
The phrase “based on” here, means they took it, they changed it. Therefore Ubuntu is a modified version of Debian.
Here is a timeline of the Linux distributions. Debian began in 1993 and if you go 20% down this file, follow the lines to the Ubuntu distributions. There are many. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/…
4 Answers 4
Zack had a great diagram explaining it on his UDS-P Talk Slides
Basically, Every Ubuntu cycle, until Debian Import Freeze, source packages that aren’t modified in Ubuntu are copied from Debian into Ubuntu, daily (the 74% branch). Packages that have been modified in both Debian & Ubuntu get manually merged (the Patch branch), usually by the developer who last touched the package in Ubuntu.
Some core packages (kernel, much of the desktop, and other bits) doesn’t come from Debian at all, and comes straight from Upstreams (the 11% branch)
So, Ubuntu gets to maintain its own core set of packages and also get the benefit of the huge quantity of Debian packages.
Ubuntu uses the same packaging management system (deb and apt) and with each development cycle pulls in the latest packages from Debian and then adapts them to Ubuntu specifics and adds more features and patches where necessary. They also push changes back to Debian and often developers are Ubuntu and Debian developers.
Mint in turn does the same with Ubuntu packages (Update: although Mint does not seem to contribute back as much or at all)
thanks. But I still have a question. If Ubuntu themselves uses Debian packages, then one should use Debian only. But still people would go for Ubuntu?
Their goals and philosophies are somewhat different. If you want a stable, cross-platform OS, by all means switch to Debian. If you want a desktop OS which runs reasonably recent versions of popular apps, choose Ubuntu.
Ubuntu uses the Debian packages as base for their own modifications and additions. As such they are not the same packages in all instances. Often things are fixed in Ubuntu and then pushed upstream to Debian later. Also often the stable release of Debian uses way older stuff, because the release less often and focus on stability. Ubuntu on the other hand takes the packages from Debian testing and releases every six month.
Debian has a very strong ideology about what packages they would include with their system. Debian would only include things licensed to be «free as in freedom» (open-source licensing) and not «free as in beer» (given away but still not truly open-source licensing). This severely limited some things in the system. For instance, video drivers may be given away, but only as binaries, which did not meet the criteria, and thus hand to be hand-installed. Ubuntu took the great framework and package system done with Debian, and made it to be a great user experience, rather than a political statement.
Erm, I’m a Ubuntu and Debian developer, and have never seen contributions from Mint. They also don’t seem to do anything to stop their users from sending us bugs 🙂
There are a number of things that define a distribution, apart from the name. Packaging system (deb, rpm, . ), standard environment (eg. the kind of «init» used as a standard), and a number of other things, like release schedule policy, main target users, etc. Notice that sharing certain core tools don’t make two distributions «siblings». See the case for Red-Hat and SuSE, for example: on the graph linked by @Zenklys, you see that SuSE is an early derivative from Slackware, but they borrowed the RPM packaging system from Red-Hat, I guess not to reinvent the wheel.
Most of those things are decisions that someone (a company, individual or a developing community) takes for you. Some distributions are quite different from each other and have almost nothing in common in their origins (Debian and Red-Hat are two examples from early times. ), result of parallel efforts on achieving a working environment, but others are born just because a sizable community agree that certain aspects of an existing distribution could be done in a different way, like having shorter (or larger!) release cycles, or maybe making the distribution less «general» and focusing on certain aspects, like media creation (you pre-install tools, try to have better/easier hardware config for specific things. ); or when a company decides they can do business by tuning a distro for certain target audiences.
Let’s keep with Ubuntu from here on, but keep in mind that this process is similar all around.
Of course, taking the «derivative» way means you start with a working system from day 0. Your work will focus on making the desired changes and on keeping up to date with the «parent» version for the parts you don’t really want to work on.
Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian in that sense: they took a working distribution and decided on a number of things. For example:
- Default (and officially supported) desktop environment and theming.
- Emphasis on a non-root user being able to access all the restricted areas (hardware setup, for example)
- Integrating tools and, sometimes, also developing new ones, to achieve their goals.
At some point they started taking more fundamental decisions, like changing crucial subsystems (going for upstart, for example), or default version of tools, like the one for Python, in which Ubuntu depends heavily.
Some of those changes may end up not taking place on the original distribution, or just taking longer time. or the opposite, where you don’t like a change that has been made in the parent distro and you arrange things so that your distribution stays the same way as it was (like when Ubuntu moved to Gnome 3 as the default).
Then again, at some point Ubuntu users decided they weren’t happy with all the choices that are being taken for them, so you end up with derivatives like Kubuntu or Xbuntu that may (or may not) end up achieving a certain «official» status within the original project.
Ubuntu has kept a some level of feedback with Debian, making it easy to take your knowledge from one to the other, but that doesn’t need to be true for all derivative distros.
And so on. but the answer is running long by now 😛
The story of Ubuntu
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It is often described as reminding us that ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. We bring the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers and software. The Ubuntu distribution represents the best of what the world’s software community has shared with the world.
Where did it all begin?
Linux was already established in 2004, but it was fragmented into proprietary and unsupported community editions, and free software was not a part of everyday life for most computer users. That’s when Mark Shuttleworth gathered a small team of Debian developers who together founded Canonical and set out to create an easy-to-use Linux desktop called Ubuntu.
The mission for Ubuntu is both social and economic. First, we deliver the world’s free software, freely, to everybody on the same terms. Whether you are a student in India or a global bank, you can download and use Ubuntu free of charge. Second, we aim to cut the cost of professional services — support, management, maintenance, operations — for people who use Ubuntu at scale, through a portfolio of services provided by Canonical which ultimately fund the improvement of the platform.
Ubuntu releases
Ubuntu was the first operating system to commit to scheduled releases on a predictable cadence, every six months, starting in October 2004. In 2006 we decided that every fourth release, made every two years, would receive long-term support for large-scale deployments. This is the origin of the term LTS for stable, maintained releases.
| Released | End of Life | Expanded security maintenance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu 19.10 | Oct 2019 | Jul 2020 | |
| Ubuntu 20.04 LTS | Apr 2020 | Apr 2025 | Apr 2030 |
| Ubuntu 20.10 | Oct 2020 | Jul 2021 | |
| Ubuntu 21.10 | Oct 2021 | Jul 2022 | |
| Ubuntu 21.04 | Apr 2021 | Jan 2022 | |
| Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Apr 2022 | Apr 2027 | Apr 2032 |
The commercial and community teams collaborate to produce a single, high-quality release, which receives ongoing maintenance for a defined period. Both the release and ongoing updates for core packages are freely available to all users.
Commercial users engage with Canonical to gain access to support, consulting, management tools, managed services and expanded security maintenance.
Governance
Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu. Members of the Canonical team lead aspects of Ubuntu such as the kernel, default desktop, foundations, security, OpenStack, and Kubernetes.
However, the governance of Ubuntu is somewhat independent of Canonical, with volunteer leaders from around the world taking responsibility for many critical elements of the project. Mark Shuttleworth, as project founder, short-lists public nominees as candidates for the Community Council and Technical Board, and they in turn screen and nominate candidates for a wide range of boards, councils and teams that take responsibility for aspects of the project.
It remains a key tenet of the Ubuntu Project that Ubuntu is a shared work between Canonical, other companies, and the thousands of volunteers who bring their expertise to bear on making it a world-class platform for anyone to use.
Ubuntu today
The first official Ubuntu release — Version 4.10, codenamed the ‘Warty Warthog’ — was launched in October 2004, and sparked dramatic global interest as thousands of free software enthusiasts and experts joined the Ubuntu community.
Ubuntu today has many flavours and dozens of specialised derivatives. There are also special editions for servers, OpenStack clouds, and connected devices. All editions share common infrastructure and software, making Ubuntu a unique single platform that scales from consumer electronics to the desktop and up into the cloud for enterprise computing.
The Ubuntu desktop is by far the world’s most widely used Linux workstation platform, powering the work of engineers across the globe. Ubuntu Core sets the standard for tiny, transactional operating systems for highly secure connected devices. Ubuntu Server is the reference operating system for the OpenStack project, and a hugely popular guest OS on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Ubuntu is pre-installed on computers from Dell, HP, Asus, Lenovo and other global vendors.
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