> 1) someone who will eventually be willing to allow me to upload the release to their anonymous ftp-site. Please contact me.
Back then data sharing was so good. Despite the now present security threats in a more weaponized net, this even beats the most convenient drag&drop sharing site.
> Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
Ironic that today it is the dependable system. Still flexible enough for development, but I guess priorities have changed.
Debian is my favorite distro, it just always works for me. The author seemed to have a tragic life and made many stops at different companies, would have been interesting to hear his reaction to the development of Debian. I don't know if he was still an active developer, Debian had many, many project leaders as far as I know.
Of course, for anyone who wants up-to-the-minute Unstable/Testing channel, Debian still has that as an option, but I'm with you on Debian Stable.
When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing. (When I was using Red Hat before Debian, there was a set of Web sites that I'd have to use to find packages, in a way that now seems naive and reckless: "https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/#software".)
The package ecosystem is more mature now, and it turns out that Debian Stable almost always has what I need, so I still get the APT experience. (I even got the closed Nvidia CUDA stack from Debian Stable `non-free` repos, the other day, and it just worked. Maybe a little too easily and well, but that's another matter.)
> When Debian's APT network package manager happened, that was pretty new and unusual. Imagine hearing about a package, typing a shell command, and Debian probably had the package, and it was installing.
I think a lot of people who came to Linux later don't fully realise how revolutionary apt was back then.
I can still remember the pain of manually downloading rpms only to find it needed another one installed first or wasn't version compatible with something else etc.
WINDOWS STILL CAN'T DO THAT