Linux has been garnering strength for a number of years now, and its still growing popularity drives more and more users to make the jump. The first step on that path is to pick a distribution. This is an important decision, because each distribution has its own peculiarities, and future migration costs can be avoided if the right choice is made from the start.
Linux has gathered a fair amount of media coverage over the years and is immensely growing, driven for example by the spreading use of virtual servers, embedded systems, and the use of artificial intelligence; it mostly benefits the distributions supported by a real marketing department — in other words, company-backed distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and so on). But Debian is far from being a marginal distribution; multiple studies have shown over the years that it is widely used both on servers and on desktops. This is particularly true among web servers where Debian and Ubuntu are the leading Linux distributions.
The purpose of this book is to help you discover this distribution. We hope to share the experience that we have gathered since we joined the project as developers and contributors in 1998 (Raphaël) and 2000 (Roland). With any luck, our enthusiasm will be contagious, and maybe you will join us sometime…
本書的第一版 (2004年) 填補了一個空白：完全專注於 Debian 的法語書。當時，還有為法語和英語讀者寫的其他圖書。不幸的是它們幾乎沒有更新過，如今我們再次發現關於 Debian 的好書實在是太少了。我們真誠地希望，本次的英文譯本 (以及包括繁體在內的譯本)，可填補這一空窗並幫助更多使用者。
