Debian is 33, Haiku is 25, and neither is standing still

This is a quiet time of year in tech circles – perhaps explaining why, 25 and 33 years ago, the people behind two ambitious operating system projects kicked them off.

Debian Last weekend, the Debian project turned 33 years old.

The Linux kernel first appeared in September 1991, so it was not quite two years old when Ian Murdock announced the new distribution. (Indeed, the term "distribution" itself hadn't really caught on yet – his announcement only uses the word as an adjective.) Sadly, Murdock died in 2015, before his project became one of the world's most widely used forms of Linux in the world.

We examined the project's history and success when it turned 30, and it continues to thrive.

It's not the oldest maintained distro: that distinction goes to Slackware, which is about a month older – it turned 30 that July.

Slackware remains actively maintained, although it has not produced a new release in a while.

The Register's own Slackware enthusiast Richard Speed looked at version 15.0 back in 2022.

Since then, we have had Debian 12 in June 2023 and Debian 13 a year ago.

And in case you're curious, as far as this vulture can see, the first release The Reg covered was Debian 2.1 in 1999.

Haiku beta beckons Meanwhile, the Haiku OS project keeps on going.

The Desktop on Fire blog celebrated with an article on 25 Years of Haiku.

Its development was prompted by Palm buying Be in August 2001, as The Register covered at the time.

A couple of days later, an email modestly titled "OK, let's start" set the OpenBeOS project in motion, as this history of project milestones describes.

Doubters might note that after a quarter of a century of work, there's still been no Haiku OS 1.0 release.