Re: (Kinda OT) What makes Debian cool?
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 12:41:21PM -0600, camilo@cancun.com wrote:
> This may sound like a stupid or minor question but i'd really like to
> hear from all of you why do you think Debian is great, in
> comparison to ALL of the other Linux distributions out there!
- The people. This mailing list is one of the greatest sources of
information about Linux (and computers in general) I've ever run
across.
- apt. Yeah, apt rocks, but we all know that already.
- The ethics. I'm not sold on the 'absolutely everything must be
100% Free' meme like some other list members, but Debian makes sure
that, if you care, you know what's Free and you know what isn't.
The attention to licensing details (qmail, anyone?) is also excellent.
- Stable. When Debian calls it "stable", you know it's stable.
Yeah, a lot of people bitch and moan about it being old, but I
appreciate being able to throw it on a server and know that it's not
going to cause conflicts, have massive security holes (love those
backported security fixes!), or just fall over for no apparent
reason.
- Unstable. You want the latest version of something? You've got
it, usually in very short order.
- Testing. For those machines where you want something fairly
recent, but don't want to gamble on unstable.
But, above all...
- The consistency. I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned
this, but it's great to install a package and know that its
configuration is in /etc, its documentation is in
/usr/share/doc/packagename, etc.
--
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius
Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
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