Re: Why choose Debian?
"Steve R. Hastings" 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.
>
It's almost embarrasing. I've been putzing around w/ Linux since around
'95 or so, and I still haven't done many of the things I need/want to do
with it (like Samba/DNS/DHCP/NIS, etc). Back in 1994 or so, I had a P90
that came w/ Win 3.11 on it, and a friend (I use the term loosely here)
told me he had this great program, neatest thing he'd ever seen. I'd
love it, he assured me. Plus, he knew that even then, I kinda liked
messing w/ beta software, since they usually had enough functionality
and were free. The hell he unleashed on my computer was a beta of
Win95!! It was kinda pretty, at least compared to Win 3.11 (never used
OS/2 or a Mac), but it didn't like my games, so how do we get rid of
it? What, I have to wipe the hard drive?!!? Ok. Turns out I lost all
the cool 'meet your computer' thingies GW2K put on there. After that, I
got pretty good at reformatting and rebuilding my computer. Windows
games are good at messing up a running system. Later, a friend of mine
heard me talking about how I'd like to learn C/C++, but couldn't afford
M$ Visual C++. So he started telling me about Linux. Sounded too good
to be true. I eventually found a copy of Slackware at a mom-n-pop
computer store (this place carried about everything that Walnut Creek
put out, including FreeBSD). The earliest kernel I remember was
something like 1.2.13 or so. But X didn't like my then-bleeding-edge
Matrox Millenium, and fvwm was butt-ugly (fast, but ugly). So I stayed
w/ Windows. I started doing more and more stuff w/ Linux, and I've
tried Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake, TurboLinux, and maybe
a few others. SuSE is nice, but getting kind of snobby towards the
small home user base, IMHO. RedHat is fine for me. Has always worked
pretty good. Caldera just didn't turn me on, for some reason. Same for
TurboLinux. Mandrake makes me feel like I've lost control of the
system. Slackware is just too much work, w/ the old *.tgz files ;)
I'm making a go of Debian for a while, since the apt-get system makes
the most sense. RedHat (or SuSE) w/ the rpm apt-get would be _very_
tempting for me, but I don't see them doing it initially, anyway,
because it would eat into RHN, and SuSE seems to be trying to get away
from yast1 (which works) for yast2 (which doesn't work). Mandrake would
have to scrap it's time invested in urpmi, but it may happen.
Until then, Debian's apt-get seems the best idea for the moment.
>
> I was told that Debian is always out of date, slow to adapt. And it
> seemed true: here the Linux 2.4 kernel was just around the corner, and
> Debian had only just released Potato, with 2.2! But as I kept reading
> the web, I began to realize that with the apt-get tools, anyone who had
> wanted 2.2 had been running it for a long time, and in fact it was easy
> to stay updated with current stuff. I can run stable for servers and
> testing for my desktop. Debian isn't behind the times!
>
I too, had a lot of internal debate over the state of most of the apps
in the debian stable tree. And I've had terrible luck w/ woody when it
was unstable, so I'm probably going to wait til it's 'frozen'. But one
thing I did realize: Once I get a given linux box roughly where I want
it, I don't update a whole lot just for the sake of updating (christ, it
was hard enough to get set up in the first place ;p ) unless it is a
serious bug/security hole. And setting apt-get to track the security
update tree covers that, at least for software that isn't in /usr/local.
> So I jumped in, and I'm still trying to get things working, but I'm
> convinced that Debian is for me.
Sounds oh-so familiar ;)
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