Re: [aclug-L] Flame bait... (distribution question)

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John wrote:

>Thanks for writing.  This is a question that comes up frequently, and
>it's great to discuss it.

I was hoping this question wouldn't start a religious distribution war.  I'm
honestly interested in why people choose the distribution they do.

>A distribution is a fairly personal decision, depending a lot on what
>your particular needs and preferences are.

I'm starting to understand this.

>Slackware is the reason that FreeBSD was the first Unix on my PC :-)


HAHA!  I had to laugh when I read this!

>> for me, so I kept it.  Since then I've set up a couple of RedHat systems,
>> and now I'm working on a Debian system.  What I'm finding is that almost
>> everything in terms of really current stuff only comes in tarballs and
rpms.
>
>Incorrect, but hey :-)


I could be wrong, but my problem is that I can't find the deb packages for
the stuff I'm interested in.  Maybe they're out there, but I can't seem to
find 'em.

>Debian's emphasis is on stability.  This often means that Debian
>doesn't have the absolute latest software in its release.

I guess I could understand that approach.  If I was doing a commercial
system, I'd think twice about using a distribution like this.

> On the other hand, you know that Debian is going to *WORK*.

Probably, unless you have any newer hardware in your system.

>  For instance, RedHat 5.0 (and I believe
>5.1 too, but not sure) had seriously broken libc5 compatibility.  5.1
>had some nasty security holes.


Yeah, the 5.0 lib thing seems to have really left a sour impression in a lot
of people's minds.

>> Are you getting source for these things and compiling them yourself?  Are
>> you running development versions of Debian (slink (until today), potato)?
>
>I am, but I suspect that as a Debian developer, I'm a special case :-)


Any of the rest of you?

>Were you aware of the "alien" tool that lets you convert RPMs to DEBs?


Yep, but the one time I tried to use it, the debs it created wouldn't
install.  I kind of lost faith at that point.

>Well, if having bleeding-edge software is more important than
>stability for you (as it is for some), then Debian may not be the best
>distribution for you.

In my case, bleeding-edge is really all that'll work for what I'm doing with
it.  At home, I'm just messing around, so I don't honestly care if it
crashes and burns (even the worst bleeding edge stuff does that less often
then the copy of W95 that I dual-boot to, so stability is a relative thing).
If I use it at work, I'll have to have pretty close to the latest hardware
support.

>Debian itself supports over 2500 .debs in its latest
>release, vs. about 600 or so in RedHat 5.2.

Now that's a big difference.  I didn't know that.

>  For instance, window
>managers in Debian support the Debian "menu" system, in which your
>menus automatically reflect the software installed on your system.

Yeah, I noticed it doing that (although it didn't seem to update all the
window managers, just the default one).  This is a seriously nice touch.
MUCH less hassle then having to edit config files, especially for something
like this that they should know you're gonna have to do anyway.

>As for the reasons I use Debian myself, there are three.
>
>1. The most important: the commitment to free software.  I am upset by
>   RedHat including non-free and even closed-source software on their
>   CDs.  Caldera is even worse in this regard.
>
>2. The package manager and development system -- has several
>   advantages over RPM.
>
>3. Large development community, bug-tracking system, and quality
>   commitment.  When Debian is released, you know it is solid.
>
>That said, Debian is weak for:
>
>1. Ease of install and configuration.  RedHat's control panels
>   are great here -- when they work :-)


These reasons & examples are the kind of arguments for (or against) a
distribution that I was hoping to see.  I appreciate the reasons others gave
too.

>Well, that's about it, but it's a biggie, and covers things like
>hardware autodetection (RedHat does it better for X and sound),
>networking configuration, etc.


The soundconfig tool's pretty cool, but I donno about the Xconfigurator
thing.  I've used it on three different systems and so far I have yet to get
even one decent operational X configuration out of it.  It detects the card
pretty well, but somehow manages to mess things up before it's done. The
xf86config tool that comes with XFree86 seems to have a much higher success
rate for me.

Greg

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