Debian rocks, OK?
Fair enough. What about kernels? Linux is amazing, but so is FreeBSD's kernel, and I'm totally thrilled that Debian is on a roll with a distribution based on it: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
I'd love to see Debian embrace OpenSolaris, based upon the good work that Nexenta has done.
But let's take a step back to 2002. There was a debian port to the NetBSD kernel started and it made some serious progress way back then. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the progress has stalled since 2002.
When I first learned of this, I figured it wasn't a big deal. I mean, not that many people use NetBSD - its a research operating system, sort of like Minix, right?
Then I learned about NetBSD and Xen.
I'm no expert on Xen or NetBSD, but from what I've read, NetBSD 5.0.1 and Xen rock the party that rocks the party.
Why is that important for Debian? I'm not sure if its super important for debian, but I'm certain that Xen and virtualization in general is super important for this world.
Virtualized machines are probably the coolest thing I've encountered since learning about debian a few years back, and I feel like we're at the tip of the iceberg.
I'm a little frustrated now that I'm not making a better case for why work on Debian GNU/kNetBSD should continue. Ah well, I'm getting distracted with a Debian GNU/Hurd virtual machine I'm trying to update. In good time, I'll support my position on Debian GNU/kNetBSD.