Re: (Kinda OT) What makes Debian cool?
On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 11:16:16AM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote:
| 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.
ditto
| - apt. Yeah, apt rocks, but we all know that already.
ditto
| - The ethics.
certainly, and this goes with the next point too
| - Stable. When Debian calls it "stable", you know it's stable.
even if it is "unstable" it is quite stable (can you say "broken
compiler"?)
| - 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.
Not only the above, but almost everything you could want is already
packaged! The first time I ran dselect (during my first install) I
was amazed at some of the packages I saw in potato. I had been
running RH 6.1 and I kept up with the latest GNOME releases (CVS
versions of some things). My RH6.1 box had some stuff on it that was
newer than RH7.0 had when it was released, and had some stuff that 7.0
didn't have at all. There were also other apps I wanted but couldn't
get to compile. Debian had it all (well, so potato's gnome was really
old, but woody's was even newer than I previously had).
| 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.
Definitely! I've had to look at some Solaris systems recently. It is
just a mess! There are 'bin' and 'etc' directories all over the
place. There's even binaries in /usr/lib/...! Just 'cause the shell
tells you "no such command" doesn't really mean there is no such
command; it's probably buried in some other psuedo-root directory.
-D
--
Reckless words pierce like a sword,
but the tongue of the wise brings healing.
Proverbs 12:18
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