Re: Was the release of Debian 2.0 put on Linux Announce?
On Mon, 3 Aug 1998, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>
> they'll soon find out that they can't compare apples with pies.
>
> What is heavier? One ton of feathers or one ton of steel?
>
Well, it is obvious that some people here are just being hard headed. I
really do not think there are that many dummies here. Look at it like
this. A person wants Linux and decides to spend about 30 minutes to choose
which one they are going to buy. These are sysadmins, not kernel
programmers. They take a quick glance, note that Red Hat is 5.2, Debian is
2.0 and all the commercial apps ship configured for Red Hat, end of
decision making process. They see 2.0 Linux and 5.2 linux NOT Debian 2.0
and Red Hat 5.2 It is how their minds work.
I explain to them that it is like SVR4. There are SEVERAL different
versions of SVR4 put out by several companies each with their own version
numbering but they are all SVR4. Once I do that, they question how
protable applications are from one distribution to another and I say it is
about like porting between SCO and Solaris or HP-UX and Solaris. Some
distributions are easier to port to/from than others. In other words, it
is a mess. THey then notice that all the commercial apps are for Red Hat
and that is the end of the decision making process. They do not care if
Debian is better, Beta is better and they do not use that either. The one
that is truely better is the one that you can find applications for.
The crux of the issue is not version numbers ... it is about portability
and standardization between Linux distributions. If Debian and Red Hat
share the same filesystem layout and basic core libraries, applications
will be portable between them even though they look and feel different.
George Bonser
Microsoft! Which end of the stick do you want today?
--
Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
Reply to: