Re: I can't believe this
George Bonser wrote:
>
> On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Jesse Evans wrote:
>
> > I feel that most of the press coverage of Linux has been tainted by the
> > commercial marketing efforts of certain distributions. If I were a writer and
> > had no knowledge of the subject matter of my current task, I would first look
> > to other media to see what gets the most play and work from there. If Debian is
> > to suceed in the Linux markeplace they need to increase their marketing
> > influence, but I think that's not their real goal; they instead want to create
> > the best distribution available and hope that those who truly care will find
> > their way through the Linux jungle.
>
> Which brings up a point I have oten pondered, if Red Hat's install is so
> great, why doesn't Debian just COPY it ... massage it a bit to make it use
> some different paths, etc, and THEN concentrate on IMPROVING it. Their
> current method of trying to invent a better wheel from scratch seems to be
> a waste of resources. It appears to be a(nother) very egotistical stance
> on the part of the Debian developers. Hell, just use the best thing that
> is out there, modify it to fit your needs, and then improve on it from
> there. Otherwise they are always going to be trying to catch up and
> wasting resources.
>
> Maybe if Debian could identify the weak points in the distro, adopt better
> ways from other distros as an intermediate measure and then get them
> completely integrated as time goes by might allow much faster progress and
> a more useable distro in the meantime.
>
I agree somewhat, but...
I had done 3 or 4 RedHat installs until I encountered a certain old
machine at work (486/33, 2 SCSI controllers). I could not get a RedHat
install (5.1 or 5.2) to work. Period. No way, no how. Always started
swapping like crazy at a certain point, about the time I started
partitioning the disks.
Tried Debian for the hell of it, worked the first time, didn't find it
unduly difficult.
I guess what I'm saying is:
* I'm not sure the installation itself needs radical fixing.
* Please preserve robustness.
* Maybe we need to represent a clear alternative.
* Maybe RedHat has its priorities wrong (flash over functionality?).
On that last point, let me insert another bit of personal experience:
I was installing RedHat 5.1 on my machine at home, and got to the disk
partitioning stage. I could not do what I needed to do from Disk
Druid. The sequence of steps needed to partition a certain way was
simply not accessible from the (pseudo-)GUI. So I used fdisk and could
do it without any problem. What I'm saying there is that if you provide
a GUI, you better be willing to spend a *lot* of time thinking it out
and debugging it, because doing it right is a lot more complex than most
people realize. (I know, I've written commercial software). Otherwise,
you trap people instead of enabling them.
So far, I feel this way about these two major distributions:
* For a machine that I want to just play with a bunch of shit on, I'd
pick RedHat. There's RPMs of everything under the sun out there; some
of them work great, some are shit; they all install and uninstall *real
fast*. That's what I want for my home machine, especially since its
fast and has a lot of disk space, so I can store and run all that shit I
download.
* For a machine that needs to be ultra-consistent, dependable,
up-to-date, locked down, I'd pick Debian. dselect and dpkg contribute
to most of those qualities. That's what I want for any server that I
use for work, especially since it's likely to be some old weird 486,
where you *need* all those Debian installation floppies with all the
drivers. (Hell, come to think of it, it might even be a m68k machine,
in which case RedHat wouldn't even be an alternative...) The other
thing is that I know everything on the CD-ROM is free, and
free/contrib/non-free is clearly identified on the ftp sites; that's
important to know in a work setting -- nothing ideological about it at
all.
I wonder how the rest of you feel about this distinction I've made?
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