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Debian is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.

Debian has been listed as one of the Engineering and technology good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
July 3, 2004	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
June 6, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed
December 4, 2008	Good article nominee	Not listed
June 24, 2014	Good article nominee	Listed
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on June 28, 2014. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the name of the Debian* operating system is a combination of the first names of its creator Ian Murdock and his then-girlfriend Debra?*
Current status: Former featured article candidate, current good article

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Software by the Debian project[edit]

Being a Linux distribution Debian consists almost entirely of free and open-source software written by 3rd parties. But some software is being developed by Debian, e.g. deb (file format), the Debian installer, Advanced Packaging Tool, and maybe some other stuff. Not sure whether this Debian-own software should get an own section. User:ScotXW^t@lk 18:41, 29 August 2016

No longer free software/open source?[edit]

It includes non-free firmware in the installer. Is this already mentioned? Alohaidled (talk) 12:21, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know if these links

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20231102171742/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/10/msg00001.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20231102171923/https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/10/msg00001.html

are already mentioned in the article or now, but some information may also need to be changed to reflect the changes in the policy of Debian.

I hope I'm using the talk page correctly.

I do not yet know where I should place this information about the policy change in Debian.

Other users may know where the best place in this article is to place the references.

I think near the top changing

"Since its founding,"

to

"Since its founding till 2022,"

And putting the links in a "ref" may be a way to show the change.

Though there may be a better way to link to the change.

Other Cody (talk) 21:19, 2 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry but that's not a proper synthesis. Debian distributed an install image with proprietary firmware long before 2022, and the FSF's disavowal of Debian also existed long before that date. "Since its founding" may not be accurate, but "until 2022" is definitely incorrect. inclusivedisjunction (talk) 11:38, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've updated it to a better synthesis that talks about how Debian generally follows FOSS principles but includes some proprietary software. Dexcube (talk) 03:35, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Debian latest software version[edit]

Latest version as of 2/13/2024 is 12.5 (not 12.4) 27.110.206.46 (talk) 03:03, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Debian Logo[edit]

The article claims that the "genie bottle" was originally part of the logo and fell out of use. That seems to me to be either misleading or simply incorrect. When the logo was originally designed, there were two versions, one for public use and one for official use. The public use one was the one with the bottle, and the official one was the swirl only. Shortly after that logo design won the competition, it was decided to swap the meaning of both logos (one of the reasons being that is was weird that the official only use logo was a subset of the public one). The official logo guidelines[1] still show that the bottle version still exists and is reserved for official use.

So it's not that the bottle version "was effectively superseded", it simply was not the correct logo to use anymore. Joghurt42 (talk) 11:03, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]