The Debian project fully acknowledges the importance of derivative distributions and actively supports collaboration between all involved parties. This usually involves merging back the improvements initially developed by derivative distributions so that everyone can benefit and long-term maintenance work is reduced.

This explains why derivative distributions are invited to become involved in discussions on the debian-derivatives@lists.debian.org mailing-list, and to participate in the derivative census. This census aims at collecting information on work happening in a derivative so that official Debian maintainers can better track the state of their package in Debian variants.

Let us now briefly describe the most interesting and popular derivative distributions.