[michael@itd.utech.de: A big THANK YOU!]
From a Debian user, to you.
----- Forwarded message from Michael Utech <michael@itd.utech.de> -----
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 19:00:53 +0100
From: Michael Utech <michael@itd.utech.de>
Organization: Utech IT-Dienstleistungen GmbH
To: webmaster@debian.org
Subject: A big THANK YOU!
Hi folks!
I didn't find a better address to say this, so please you to forward
the message to appropriate places if you care.
I was a regular SuSE Linux user (and programmer, admin) since their
very early versions. Their release politics brought me to re-evaluating
several linux distributions. The result has been terrible, most dists
are buggy, i mean so buggy that even windows 95 seems more robust.
Especially red hat 7 is a joke... I spend day after day, reconfiguring
the systems, getting more and more frustrated. Even though i played
around with open source systems I felt like diving into NT-Registry.
There are also nice tries, like EasyLinux, Corel, Caldera, Go!Linux,
but all of them had their shortcomings.
>From the old days, i loved the way, the bsd-folks build their systems:
Clean and robust, easy to understand for an not-so-old unix guy. But
*BSD is just a bit to far away from mainstream and has some
disadvantages if one wants to use current technologies, like pam,
ldap and such. Also some important commericial software packages are
not available or not yet robust. So I decided not to use FreeBSD and
to use OpenBSD only as firewall.
Then finally i came across Debian again. Last time, i took a closer look
at Debian I disliked the software packaging and management tools a lot
(especially dselect is somewhat out of the ordinary). Since I spend
so much time into Red Hat and SuSE I felt that I should give Debian
another try.
Now I am not just happy. I'm not even finding the right expression
for what I want to say.
*** DEBIAN IS GREAT! ***
All I ever wanted from a Linux system.
It's robust, easy to understand (yes, even if you are
not hyping around with graphical installation), easy to install
(yes even if I am asked a lot of questions at the beginning),
impressively easy to update (i grasped for air when I first saw how
easy it is, that I even don't need to reboot the machine...), easy
to use (i don't need to compile every packet on my own, because
of silly or short minded precompilation) things just work out
of the box and if not, it's no problem to get them work in an hour.
What you call "unstable" is more than any commecial linux vendor
can hope to reach. They should be ashamed (Red head, instead of
Red hat?).
Now coming to another topic. Your website. Whow...
It's just like the other stuff the best I ever saw. Including
RH, SuSE, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Caldera, EasyLinux or Corel.
You managed to combine the advantages of Linux, *BSD and commercial
UNIX vendors without any visible disadvantages (at least I don't see
any yet).
I just hope, really hope, that you can manage to get more popularity.
Sure everybody knows the name Debian, but I really wonder why RH and
SuSE can sell their distributions while there is such a great system
out there as Debian. At least I will stop using both and do my very
best to contribute to Debian.
Thank you for your work!
Michael
--
Michael Utech
email: michael@itd.utech.de
----- End forwarded message -----
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