Re: What to choose
On Wed, 3 Oct 2001 22:22, Teppo Hytönen wrote:
> What comes to choosing between the two, it's personal preference that
> matters. I myself recommend Debian: I love it myself, and yes, apt-get is
> great. Then again, I haven't used Mandrake, but haven't heard a single
> positive comment about it, other than that it is easy to install; many say
> too easy, so that you can't configure things you might want even if you
> have enough skill to do it. I've heard that in many cases it doesn't work
> right.
I think you're being a bit hard on them. I've heard positive reports about
Mandrake, and the Mandrake developers I've talked to seem quite smart.
However I get the impression that Debian has more smart developers than any
other distribution, and I think that upstream maintainers often have a
similar opinion. I recently received an email from an upstream author saying
"I didn't know any distribution had included my code, I might have known
Debian would do it first", I think that is an indication of the good opinion
upstream authors have of Debian developers.
I think that you can compare distributions without using them. If you know
who develops a distribution, who pays them (if anyone), what their aims are,
and how long they have been at it then you can get a good idea of what
product they will develop and whether it will suit you.
Debian has a large team of people who work for fun (most of them get paid
nothing for their work - many of them are doing Debian work instead of doing
paid work). The Debian developers are generally highly skilled by any
standards of measurement. The aim of the project is to develop the best
possible OS according to the general aims of the FSF, where "best" is
measured by the developers themselves. The result is that there is a huge
number of developers (any skilled person who has the time is welcome), a huge
number of packages (any developer can add a new package at short notice
without asking for permission), a good solid base, and a lot more work is
needed on installation programs and documentation (no offense to the people
who work on it - really they need more help from the rest of us).
So we can advocate Debian without mentioning other distributions. Once they
know what Debian is about they'll either like it or they won't. Other
distributions have much better installation routines, and may be more
suitable for novices for that reason.
I've CC'd this message to debian-user as it really has nothing to do with
laptops.
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