On 16 August 2026, the Debian Project turned 33 years old. Founded in 1993 by Purdue University student Ian Murdock, Debian has grown from a modest Linux-based operating system into one of the most influential free-software projects in the computing world. Its influence, however, is often invisible: People regularly use software derived from Debian without ever installing – or even hearing of – Debian itself.
Debian describes itself as “The Universal Operating System”, a free OS built entirely from free software and maintained by a global community of contributors. Its breadth is evident in the current stable release, Debian 13, codenamed “Trixie,” on which this article was written. Released on 9 August 2025 after more than two years of development, it contains 69,830 packages, including over 14,100 new ones. Another 44,326 packages were updated, while more than 8,840 obsolete packages were removed. Debian 13’s archive represents approximately 403GB of data and 1.46 billion lines of code, according to the official Debian Project website. The release also supports a wide range of CPU architectures, including x86-64, ARM, PowerPC, IBM System z, and – for the first time as an official Debian architecture – 64-bit RISC-V.
That combination is what makes the word “universal” meaningful. Debian can be used on desktops and laptops, but the same project also produces images for cloud platforms and systems ranging from development servers to database, web, and storage servers, as well as everyday users.
Philosophy and ecosystem
Debian’s philosophy is as important as its technical reach. Its Social Contract commits the project to remaining open source and supporting the free-software community. The Debian Free Software Guidelines provide the principles used to determine whether software qualifies as free. This does not mean Debian software comes without legal conditions; software is distributed under licences that grant users specific freedoms, subject to those licences. This philosophy has allowed Debian to remain a community project rather than a conventional commercial operating system.
One of Debian’s most significant contributions is its package-management ecosystem. For newcomers, Debian’s repositories may resemble an app store, but APT – the Advanced Package Tool – is more than a catalogue. It retrieves packages from configured repositories and manages installation, upgrades, and dependencies with remarkable efficiency. APT has helped Debian’s influence extend far beyond computers running Debian itself. Ubuntu is Debian-derived; Kali Linux and Raspberry Pi OS are also built on Debian. Debian’s own documentation notes that the project has spawned over 420 derivatives, with more than 120 described as active at the time of writing.
Measuring the number of Debian users is surprisingly difficult. Debian itself acknowledges that no precise user statistics are available, as the project does not require registration. Instead of seeking a mythical global user count, we can look at its presence in web infrastructure. W3Techs reported Linux on 62.7 per cent of websites whose operating system it could identify. Debian itself was detected on 3.7 per cent of all websites whose operating system was known. The data also showed Debian on 5.5 per cent of the top one million websites, compared with 4.5 per cent of the top 100,000 and 3.9 per cent of the top 10,000 in its July 2026 ranking breakdown. These figures do not prove that Debian runs the internet; they show something more useful: Debian has a measurable and significant presence in the infrastructure behind the web.
In August 1993, Ian Murdock announced a new Linux distribution while an undergraduate at Purdue University. He wanted it to be developed openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU, rather than by a single individual or company. Debian was officially founded on 16 August 1993. The name Debian came from the names of Murdock and his then-wife, Debra Lynn.
Murdock’s January 1994 Debian Manifesto outlined his ambition for a distribution developed openly by a community. The project quickly became more organised. Its early package-management system evolved into dpkg, while responsibility for individual packages increasingly shifted to different developers. By the Debian 0.93 release in 1995, many developers were maintaining their own packages. This evolution matters because Debian’s longevity was never simply about writing an operating system;; it was also about creating a system for thousands of people to build and maintain software together. Murdock passed away on 28 December 2015. Debian dedicated its Debian 9 “Stretch” release to his memory.
Debian 13 offers an interesting answer to why a project started in 1993 still matters in 2026. It supports both older hardware and modern technologies such as RISC-V, while retaining Debian’s traditional emphasis on stability and broad hardware support. The project also promises five years of support for Debian 13 through the combined efforts of its Security and Long-Term Support teams.
What Debian means to Bangladeshi users
While writing this article, I spoke with a student and a software developer about their experiences with Debian and its best-known descendant. Sajjad Kabir Joy, a student at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology who has been using Debian for over 12 years, started with Ubuntu before moving to Debian, which he calls “the real thing.” What keeps him there is Debian’s flexibility. “It can be a beginner’s desktop or a highly specialised system-built package by package from source,” he said. Compared with Windows, he points to Debian’s stable release cycle and its commitment to software freedom as reasons for his loyalty.
Senior Software Engineer at Penta Global Ltd Arafat Ahmed is a frontend specialist who uses Ubuntu, Debian’s best-known descendant. He says Ubuntu has taught him what happens behind his applications: How Node.js processes run, how network ports are managed, and how data moves through HTTP, WebSocket, and TCP connections. Arafat runs PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis in Docker containers and uses Nginx to recreate production conditions locally. Tools such as curl, netstat, and lsof help him diagnose networking problems. For him, Ubuntu is not simply an operating system; it is part of how he learns and works.
As a working journalist, I also do independent OSINT and cybersecurity research. Much of my personal hardware is what most people would call outdated. A Raspberry Pi 2 server running Raspberry Pi OS (itself a Debian-based operating system) handles my task automation scripts and connects me to home from the office. I do heavier research and analysis on a sixth-generation Core i5 PC with 16GB of DDR4 RAM running Debian 13.
Even my home router, running OpenWrt (a lightweight Linux-based operating system, but not a Debian derivative), continued working long after its WAN port physically failed. I also use my ageing workstation for everyday tasks such as browsing the internet and watching films – and my 6.5-year-old son plays online games on it. For me, that is the real meaning of a “Universal Operating System.”
Debian has spent 33 years building an ecosystem far larger than its own brand. A student can install it on an old computer. A developer can work on Ubuntu without thinking about Debian. A Raspberry Pi can run a Debian-derived operating system. A web developer can encounter Debian somewhere beneath the server stack. A journalist can use it to turn ageing hardware into a research ecosystem. The most remarkable thing about Debian may therefore be that many people can use what Debian helped build without ever knowing its name.
Happy birthday, Debian.
