Re: Why choose Debian?
>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.
>
>Perhaps we can collect the responses together, edit them, and put the
>result up on the debian.org web page. I have looked and looked, both on
>the Web and in the book store, and I have found few explanations of why
>people prefer a particular distribution. (There is lots of "why you
>should use Linux" but not much of "why I use Debian rather than
>something else".)
Here's mine:
I found out about Red hat 5.1 just surfing through the web one day on my
mighty Win 95 box. I had recently purcha$ed System Commander because I
wanted to try OS/2 and any other OS that ran on a PC because I was getting
fed up with windows. I was very excited when I pulled the Red Hat CD's out
of the box and set up system commander to use it. I got very frustrated
trying to make everything work, read to many reviews saying Linux wasn't
ready for mainstream, and scraped it. When 5.2 came out I tried it again.
Same story, things worked easier and I was able to get more things
functional. I used 5.2 for about 6 months and was getting to the point that
I didn't want to use Windows anymore. I wanted to take advantage of Linux as
a server so I setup an old machine with the just out RH 6.1. I set up a
network with a RH server, desktop, and one winbox. The reason I chose 6.1
was they had advertised a new "easy" way to keep rpm's up to date. I had
heard about Debian but had veered away because everyone said it was difficult
to use. Well, I tried using their rpm update tool and it crashed; HARD. It
locked up my machine everytime I tried to use it! After a couple of weeks of
reading everything I could on how to fix it I finally gave up. That was it,
I had reached the same frustration point that I had when I used windows.
That phrase I used to hear from tech support or some other person trying to
help me seemed to be reappearing everywhere I looked:
"If you purcha$e the updated version that problem will be fixed"
or
"You just need to upgrade to the latest rpm and it'll work"
The problem was I could never find the "latest" rpm and even when I did, the
damn thing never installed because I couldn't find the "latest" dependicies.
Arrrrrrggggggghhhh!!!!
Enter Debian. (I could swear I hear "Bad to the bone" playing in the
background)
In one weekend I had converted both server and network to Debian with no loss
of any previous functionality. I learned more about Linux in one month using
Debian than I could have in a year with another distribution. Since that
fateful day approximately 12 months ago I have installed Samba, got a DNS
caching nameserver up, rsynced and created a local mirror on my server so I
only have to download once to update both machines, exported that mirror NFS
to my desktop, created a mail server to store my mail centrally.
Sounds like I know what I'm doing doesn't it? Wrong. I have absolutely no
formal computer education. None, nada, zip. Debian isn't the toughest
distribution to use,
It is a teaching distribution.
Once you learn how they document, learn how to access the resources on
www.debian.org, get on debian-user, you just can't lose.
Top 10 reasons to use Debian
10. The package manager is magic.
9. You don't have to type /mnt before actually entering the CD-ROM directory.
8. The package manager is magic.
7. If packages don't install in a usable configuration, it's called a bug.
6. The package manager is magic.
5. Try man debian_rocks for reason #6
4. The package manager is magic, for real, I mean it.
3. You get to choose if you want to run unstable apps.
2. See #4
1. Did I mention the package manager was magic?
Jesse
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