Reception
Debian was ranked second only to Ubuntu (which is derived from Debian) for Most Used Linux Distribution for both personal and organizational use in a 2007 survey by SurveyMonkey.com. Debian won the 2007 poll on Server Distribution of the Year by LinuxQuestions.org.
Both the Debian distribution and their web-site have won various awards from different organizations. Debian was awarded the 2004 Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Linux Distribution by the Linux Journal. A total of fifteen other awards have been awarded throughout Debian's lifetime including Best Linux Distribution.
Debian has also received negative assessments. In May 2008, a Debian Developer revealed his discovery that changes made in 2006 to the random number generator in the version of the openSSL package distributed with Debian and other Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu or Knoppix, made a variety of security keys vulnerable to a random number generator attack. The security weakness was caused by changes made to the openssl code by another Debian Developer in response to memory debugger warnings. The security hole was soon patched by Debian and others, but the complete resolution procedure was cumbersome for users because it involved regenerating all affected keys, and it drew criticism to Debian's practice of making Debian-specific changes to software.
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have criticized the Debian Project for providing the non-free repository, rather than excluding this type of software entirely, an opinion also echoed by some in Debian including the then-Project Leader Wichert Akkerman. The internal dissent in the Debian Project regarding the non-free section has persisted, but the last time it came to a vote in 2006, a large majority decided to keep it.
During the release cycles of Woody and Sarge, the Debian Project drew considerable criticism from the free software community because of the long time between stable releases. This triggered the creation of Ubuntu in 2004. Ubuntu has releases every 6 months which are forks of Debian's unstable distribution with bug fixes and other modifications. However, it may be more appropriate to compare Debian releases (which continue to be supported after the release of subsequent versions) to Ubuntu's Long Term Support releases (which are supported for five years for servers and also for five years for desktops starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS); Ubuntu produces a new LTS release every two years, which is therefore similar to Debian's new two-year release cycle for post-Debian 6.0 releases.
When in need of updated versions of software, it is possible to use Debian testing instead of stable as it usually contains more modern, though slightly less stable packages. Another alternative is to use Debian backports, which are "recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution".
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—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
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“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)