Ian Murdock and Debian of Today

Ian Murdock and Debian of Today

His Sad Demise

Ian was Debian founder.

He committed suicide for no apparent reason.

I think his wife Debra coined the name Deb-Ian.

In Ceylon, if you cross the police you mysteriously disappear.

In America, the way of the disappearance is simple.

The authorities make one to commit suicide.

It is the C.I.A. style.

It amounts to brutality.

Linux Community lost the father figure.

The Linux community all round the world did mount a protest against this brutality. It was like the Texas guy, TexStar retiring, prematurely from PCLinux without a proper successor.

This wealthy computer expert has been found dead following an encounter with the police which left him hospitalised.

Ian Murdock, a millionaire software engineer famed for his work on a free operating system called Debian, took to Twitter before his death and published a number of astonishing police brutality allegations.     In a long series of social media posts, the 42 year old father claimed "uneducated, evil, and sadistic" cops attacked me. But the San Francisco Police Department said he was drunk at the time of his arrest and was injured when he banged his head, accidentally. Murdock was detained early on Sunday morning, before issuing a tirade of tweets upon his release, which only stopped shortly before he died.

His Twitter account has now been closed but records of it are being openly shared online and can still be found in Google's cache.

In his tweets, the tragic programmer threatened to commit suicide and claimed officers "beat the s*** out of him".

“My career is over now, so I'll be gone soon”,         he tweeted on Sunday.

Cops told the tech website, The Register and            a local newspaper site called SFGate that the tech mogul was arrested on Saturday December 26 after police received reports of a man trying to break into a house. Murdock had allegedly been drinking and was aggressive with officers, later sustaining a wound on his forehead which required hospital treatment.                San Francisco police spokeswoman Officer Grace Gatpandan said this injury happened when Murdock banged his head whilst struggling with officers in the back of a police car. He was then hauled out of the car "to keep him from harming himself" she alleged, before being taken to hospital.

Murdock was then released and arrested a second time at 2.40AM on Sunday morning after banging on a neighbor's door, before being locked in jail and bailed for $25,000.

Ian Murdock died young, his tragic death after altercation with police following a minor binge.           No proper investigation was made after his death.

 

It is very difficult to give a summary of Debian Linux.

 

Even though, I use Debian Gnome for day to day work, I recommend Ubuntu for newbies. However, Ubuntu 21.10 could not configure my wireless mouse but Ubuntu 22.10 did configure wireless network and the wireless mouse.

But has significantly fewer packages.

I use Debian for over 25 years and I do not bother about updates.

Current kernel is 6.12LTS.

The current Gnome is 48. GNOME 49 is the release desktop environment that was officially launched in September 2025.

First impression of Debian 12 is, it is smooth and fast. Debian is the father of all current distributions including Ubuntu and is not a commercial distribution.Debian 12Bookworm had over 64,000 software packages in its repository at the time of its release. Debian 13 "Trixie" contains over 69,830 packages, with more than 14,100 of them being new. The total number includes updates to 63% of the packages from the previous version, Debian 12 Bookworm and the removal of over 8,800 obsolete packages.

Debra and Ian started it.

Ian left us very young in 2015 aged 42 after an altercation with the Police.

He was married in 1993 to Debra Lynn.

Debian was established in 1993.

He made Linux implementation global.

Divorced in 2008 with three kids and very little is known about Lynn. She appeared to be an author.

By the way, I use Debian as my base.

Its complete install has almost all the desktops incorporated but one can choose individual Isos of different desktops in “Live DVDs” for live sessions and for install.

It is an embodiment of Linux Community for the Community. Everything from documentation to implementation is community based and resist proprietary software by default.

Debian 13 is already released and is at 13.1.0. stage and is feature rich and stable. The latest official stable Debian image is Debian 13.1, code named "Trixie," released on September 6, 2025. For developers or those wanting the cutting edge, the unstable branch (code named "sid") is where active development happens. For those looking for the next stable release, the testing distribution is code named "Forky" is Debian 14.  Debian 15 is named as Duke.

I have both “Trixie” and “Forky” installed in my NUC and the latter contains "laptop" tasks to help to configure for laptops.