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

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> >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.

Yes, it's a very valid question.  It certainly would start a flamewar
on Usenet, but aclug-L is much better than Usenet for these sorts of
questions :-)

> >Slackware is the reason that FreeBSD was the first Unix on my PC :-)
> 
> HAHA!  I had to laugh when I read this!

Hehe :-)

It's quite true, too :-)

Slackware wouldn't install on my system (course this was in the kernel 
1.x days), there was no Debian or RedHat to speak of back then, so I
went to FreeBSD :-)

> >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.

The trick is that these are generally to be found in Debian's
"unstable" branch.  Debian developers generally build the .debs
(although anyone can; I believe KDE is building their own .debs these
days).  It is true that for third-party software (not included with
your distribution) that comes in any form other than source .tar.gz,
it's more likely it will be in RPM form than .deb form.  On the other
hand, it's more likely that the software will not be considered
third-party if you are using Debian :-)

Incidentally, for me, the RPMs out there are useless because they are
all built for i386 and I am running on a DEC Alpha box :-)

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

Yes, it's a different philosophy.  Debian is very popular for servers
and for workstations because of this.  RedHat is very popular for home 
use because it takes the other approach.  Again, it depends on your
needs.  This is why I refrain from calling any distribution "better"
than the other, because it's not really true.  For a particular use,
one is better than the other, but needs vary so much that a
generalization isn't really possible.

> > On the other hand, you know that Debian is going to *WORK*.
> 
> Probably, unless you have any newer hardware in your system.

The only thing that's out-of-date with Debian's latest release is X.
It does come with kernel 2.2.x, although it's not the default.  (You
can just install the package off the CD to get it.)  RedHat has the
same situation with X, I believe.

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

I know a lot of people that stuck with 4.x (4.2, I think) until 5.2
came out.

> >I am, but I suspect that as a Debian developer, I'm a special case :-)
> 
> Any of the rest of you?

I should say here that I run complete.org solely on Debian's
"unstable" tree, and as you can probably tell, I still have much
better uptime than NT :-)

The caveat, though, is that you have to follow the development
progress, because things do break in unstable due to changes -- ie
libc changes, etc.  OTOH, it's still more stable than 95 :-)

> 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.

Ahh, bummer.  I've only used it once -- to convert the i386 emulator
for Alpha from Alpha RPM to Alpha .deb -- and it worked, so I don't
complain :-)

> 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).

Indeed, and so Debian may not be the best choice for you at home.

> If I use it at work, I'll have to have pretty close to the latest hardware
> support.

There really isn't much of a difference between RedHat and Debian
here, except that RedHat does some autodetection better.

> 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.

Hmm, it should update all of them (it does on my system).  If it
doesn't, a bug needs to be filed someplace.

Another advantage of Debian that I forgot to mention is upgrades.
Generally, you don't even have to reboot the system when you upgrade a 
Debian box (this is very important for servers).  With RedHat, you end 
up having to boot off a floppy or CD-ROM again, and the upgrade
process is not nearly as clean or automated as it is in Debian
(although they are getting better).

> 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.

> 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.

Hehe, yeah I still use xf86config myself.  Seems to be better than
XF86Setup for me.

But any of those three tools beat the days when you didn't have any,
and had to read the documentation and learn WAY more than you ever
wanted to know about how monitors work in order to get it going.
(That is, you had to write your own modelines, if you've ever seen the 
ones in XF86Config.)  So we have come a long way since then -- in
every distribution :-)

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