Re: (Kinda OT) What makes Debian cool?
> Hi people!
>
> 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!
>
> For me , the Apt package managing tool solely is like 50% of the
> reasons i like Debian for! ;)
apt is certainly good. but one of the main reasons i like it
is it's stability. it doesn't change often. i am strongly
against upgrading often when the upgrades involve radical new
versions of software. upgrading on debian is pretty smooth,
I have not used another OS where upgrading was as smooth, most
others the best way to upgrade is to a clean install. i have
heard of many horror stories of people trying to upgrade
redhat systems, or mandrake .. and i have my own horror story
about trying to upgrade openbsd. i hear freebsd 4.5 is
on the horizon, i shall see how upgrading one of my test
freebsd 4.4 boxes goes when it appears.
most of my workstations are running testing but i only upgrade
once every month or 2(or longer). all but 2 of my servers
are running potato(~35-40 potato, 2 testing).
also i find the mirroring of the archive around the world
very powerful, i have a few redhat systems and it has always
been a royal pain trying to find a working redhat mirror when
their main site was full(which happens pretty often it seems).
the naming scheme (http.XX.debian.org) vs what redhat has(last
time i checked they had no naming scheme) makes it easy to
guess mirror sites without having to find a page that
lists the actual mirrors.
and packages.debian.org is EXTREMELY useful. being able
to input a filename and find what package it belongs to,
and/or searching for a package name. from what i understand
the newer apt utils have this built in, but that functionality
is not in potato last i checked.(though apt-cache is ..)
and of course the massive selection of packages is a plus,
less to download from other sources. a few days ago one
of the employees at the company i work for asked to have
emacs installed on a system, and my fellow co worker
managed to install it within seconds, and he isn't
someone i would consider to be real strong in unix,
but he knew apt-cache, and he knew apt-get, all he had
to do was wait for it to download and install and thats
it. i joked about it with him saying "yeah it can be
a real pain in the ass to install software", "damn that
apt-get, sometimes you gotta do an update before trying
to install, such a waste of time", had a good laugh.
nate
Reply to: