Re: Why choose Debian?
"Steve R. Hastings" <steve@hastings.org> wrote:
>I am interested in why people prefer Debian to other Linux
>distributions. Please explain the top few reasons why you chose Debian
>rather than something else.
A friend at university (hi, Pete!) introduced me to Linux part-way
through my first year (early 1998). At that time I'd had a DOS/Windows
background, and the whole concept of distributions was alien to me. We
had handy networked local mirrors of lots of stuff, though, so I picked
Red Hat 5.1 more or less at random. He helped me get it installed, and
then more or less left me to play around with it and occasionally pester
him with stupid questions.
Of course, that initial installation was a complete disaster. From what
I've seen, first-time Linux installations frequently are. Back then I
dual-booted to Windows 95, though, which I depended on for mail and
news, so I didn't end up using Linux all that much, and I had nothing
important stored on that partition. Red Hat 5.2 was out a couple of
months after that, as I remember, so I scrapped the first botched job
and installed that from scratch.
Over time, I started to use Linux more and more. All my coding was done
there, of course, and it was so much more convenient for random text
processing. I moved my e-mail over to Unix mail clients, and although I
still used a Windows newsreader that was usually by way of WINE. I was
installing random packages out of RH's powertools and contrib
directories for all sorts of things, and I upgraded to Red Hat 6.0 by
hand ('rpm -Uvh' lots of times) half-way through an uptime of 80 days or
so. As I stressed the system more and more, though, it became obvious
that it just wasn't coping. I couldn't keep all the dependencies of an
entire distribution in my head and manage them by hand, and some of the
packages I needed were just too broken: I spent ages trying to configure
suck, for instance, which later on Just Worked with Debian's get-news
script, and I was having pretty serious problems getting kernels to
compile with the gcc I had (actually egcs).
By this time, the original friend was running Debian: slink, I think,
though he might have started running bits of the then unstable potato by
that time. It eventually got through to me that his system was running
much more smoothly, even if the /etc tree did look pretty unfamiliar, so
I decided I'd take a spare partition and give it a shot. One of the
reasons I'd been putting it off was that I'd watched him over his
shoulder as he ran dselect and it looked like total gibberish. Still, I
inhaled the installation manual and it said to run dselect after getting
the system up and running, so I did so. To my surprise, it made complete
sense after a day or two, and I started happily keeping up-to-date with
unstable. (I started off with potato, even though this was literally
pretty unstable at the time, as the Perl reorganization had happened not
long beforehand.)
All of a sudden, I had so much less trouble getting basic things to
work. I no longer had to fight with dependencies, or download random
unreliable 'contrib' packages that were incompatible with the rest of
the system. Mail and news just worked, and I had a sensible gcc that
could compile whatever 2.1 kernel was available at the time. As well,
Cambridge, England (where I've lived for the last few years) is Debian
heaven, with a number of Debian developers and loads of Debian users
wandering around the local computing societies and related social
groups, so, on the rare occasions when I needed it, support was easy to
find.
Some months after that, I started building quite a number of things from
source, and inhaled some more documentation, this time on building
Debian packages. Nobody had packaged version 4 of the trn newsreader, so
I put together a local package of it based on the existing package, and
hacked it from that out of all recognition over time. By now,
maintaining packages has become one of the things I enjoy.
These days, I'm pretty committed to using and working on Debian. When I
was put in front of a Red Hat box on the first day of my new job, I
think it was less than a week before I installed Debian on it instead. I
use free software whenever I can, and when I use non-free programs I can
find out the ways in which they're non-free. Even though I track
unstable, almost everything works, and I know where to go for things
that don't. From time to time I've contemplated building a Linux system
from the ground up - but I've always been stopped by the realization
that, if I did so, it would end up looking like a poor man's version of
Debian.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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