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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