SimplyMepis going back to Debian for source

For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.

The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.

I’m glad this is happening, not because I have any ill-will towards Ubuntu; on the contrary, my laptop runs Ubuntu. But because I felt that the Debian folks were unfairly getting a lot of slack simply because being based on Ubuntu was the cool new thing to do.

Of course, this will make that Linux family tree that keeps popping up on digg look pretty interesting.