"Why Debian Live?", you may ask. Here are the reasons:
What is wrong with current live systems?
There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:
- They are unofficial projects, developed outside of Debian.
- They mix different distributions, e.g. testing and unstable.
- They support i386 only.
- They change package's behavior and/or appearance by stripping them down to save space.
- They include unofficial packages.
- They ship custom kernels with additional patches not part of Debian.
- They are large and slow due to their sheer size and thus not suitable for rescue issues.
- They are not available in different flavours, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB-stick and netboot images
Why create our own live system?
Debian is the Universal Operating System: Debian should have an official live system for showing around and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:
- It would be an official Debian subproject.
- It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
- It runs on as many architectures as possible.
- It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
- It does not contain any unofficial packages.
- It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches.