[aclug-L] Re: Why Debian?

[Greg House <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, you wrote:

> My question is: Can anyone point me to well-written arguments for or
> against particular distros in a Unix-savvy, availability-critical
> environment?  My personal experience points to Debian, but I'd like to
> have some more info to back it up.

Guess I'll be the dissenting opinion. My personal opinion is that Debian is
probably great for systems you take a long time to very carefully set
up...tweak...tweak again...get it JUUUUST right, and then never touch again.
Provided systems that are using older hardware and don't need any of the
features or fixes of current software released...

Unfortunately, I can't think of very many systems I would personally set up
that fit those specifications. I need things that set up very quickly, that
support a lot of contemporary hardware, that will change day after tomorrow.

At work, I set up things that need to look like what my real world customers
either are using or might use. Virtually all of them use Red Hat. So that's
what I use to create those configurations. I have the CDs laying around
already, so I use it for other projects as well. It sets up quickly with
preconfigured package sets (Gnome Workstation, KDE Workstation, Server, etc)
and I don't have to mess around with configuring a million individual packages
that I may or may not even be interested in to get a system up and running.

I don't have any great distro bias's really. Frankly, RedHat frequently
frustrates me because of the "easy configuration tools" that seem to keep
undoing what I do with the config files. If I wanted to run something that had
an "easy graphical" config tool that screwed up my system, I'd run Windows. My
favorite distribution is still Slackware, but I don't choose it very often
because RedHat (or Mandrake, or whatever) has a lot of prepackaged
applications that I want to use. They're already on the CD and I don't have to
mess with scouring the Internet for them...spending hours downloading them,
building them from source (because the only packaged version is for RedHat),
and letting them install themselves wherever they happen to want to on my
system (where I can't find 'em to remove them if I later decide I don't want
the app) and all that. I do run Slackware on a couple of older hardware
systems I have at home on which the Mandrake or RedHat installers won't work.
They both crash part of the way through the install, Slack installs and runs
flawlessly on the same machines. 

I haven't used SUSE. I tried it a couple of years ago, had trouble 'cause all
the readme files (in the English installation option...) were written in
German, no thanks. 

I've really wanted to like Debian because I like the philosophy of the
organization behind it, but I've tried 3 different revisions of it, at
different times over a period of 2-3 years, and have always found it tedious.
The installations took hours and hours of manually answering questions about
how I wanted a ton of packages which  I didn't care about configured and then
when it was all said and done still didn't have everything I wanted installed or
configured. It has the steepest learning curve of any Linux distribution I've
seen. I can't possibly imagine recommending it to a new user. If you want to
see Linux adoption increase at your company, I think an easier distribution is
needed. After several weeks of reading manuals and readme files, you might end
up with an extremely stable system that won't give much trouble down the line,
but that just doesn't fit with the real world expectations that most of our
industry has for a piece of software. Most people don't want to know that much
about it, they just want something that runs...quickly and painlessly. I think
many other distributions do that better then Debian.

As far as all the "buggy" releases of RedHat. All I can say is that I haven't
run into anything that held me up much. Even the worst Red Hat release would
seem to be a lot better (quality wise) then NT. If it's an easy sell into your
organization because of the name recognition, why not?

Greg

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