Re: slashdot poll
Kenneth Scharf wrote:
> Actually it's not that Debian is built to be hard to use.
> It's just that many of the 'pretty' system control and configure
> applications supplied by RH are not in Debian. (Besides they only work
> in X)
As someone who has recently come to use Debian from a year or two of
RedHat experience, I can say that the non-X-based nature of dselect can
be a distinct advantage when you're trying to configure a server machine
(damn thing sure doesn't need X). I mean, I just telnetted into it and
did everything from my (Win95!) client.
And what about installation on an old machine that doesn't have a
CDROM? dselect was quite FTP-friendly; I couldn't get a RedHat
installation to work at all on this old machine that had only 8M and
antiquated hardware. There are more Debian floppies but, guess what?
Debian saw all my hardware right first try.
I think a lot of those folks that love RedHat only use it on their home
machine with the latest and greatest nifty hardware, sitting at its
console. But that may well not be the most useful application of
Linux...
And another thing: a lot of those X-based configuration things don't
work that well. I know that for sure... ;-)
And the way dselect goes ahead and invokes configuration scripts: rpm
definitely does *not* do that; so if the package really requires
configuration beyond the defaults, you need to figure out how to do it.
Not to mention the way you can load packages down from the web really
easily. I mean, hell, it even tells you when there's an updated
package!
So far, Debian seems to me like a workhorse: it may not be flashy, but
everything just *works*. That beats flash every time in my book.
And another thing: the transparency with which Debian is managed. What
the hell do I mean? You can see the whole bug-tracking process. Try
that with RedHat. Right... And the way they segregate the non-free
stuff. It's not that you can't use it; you just know what you're
getting. That's not ideology for me; that's just knowing what's going
on my system: it's damn *useful* to know what's GNU-licensed and what's
STING (Stuff That Is Not GNU). It *is* a sting when it doesn't work
right and you want to change it...
And is it just me, or is everybody and his mother putting out RPMs these
days, some of very shoddy quality? I have the impression, if it's a deb
and it's on Debian's site, it's gonna at least install properly and do
*something* without crapping out...
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Especially hearing folks
bitch about dselect. I just hope apt is as good. (It's not X-based, is
it? Say it's not...)
Hope the new logo is good. I kind of like the little bird...
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