RE: Why Debian?

["Lucas Bruand" <lbruand@wanadoo.fr>]

> On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 09:20:50AM +0200, Johan van der Walt wrote:
> [snip]
> > My question then is: what makes Debian GNU/Linux different so that I
> > should use it rather than any of the other distributions? Is Linux not
> > just Linux? From a scientific point of view I use IRAF and that comes
> > with Debian which is something I like. However, that certainly cannot
> > be the only reason for using Debian.
> >
> > Someone told me the other day that Debian is the most stable
> > distribution. Is that so and why?
>
> The most oft cited reasons are the superior dependency resolution
> and testing of Debian packages.  Other distro's are reportedly
> getting better at the first.  Hopefully all will become LSB
> conformant, so it'll be a little easier to grab packages not
> available with the distro ("alien" can already help with RPM's).
>
> The most oft cited reasons against are the long release cycles, a
> [possibly undeserved] reputation for being harder to install and for
> providing few "user friendly" system management interfaces.
>
> I switch to Debian from Red Hat 3 years ago, and haven't looked
> back.  Those Debian developers must be doing something right, no?

	I recently switched from Mandrake ( A redhat-based distr.) to Debian,
and I have to say that I am delighted. As developper, all the features, I am
looking
for, are in Debian:

	* Configurable installation:  With Mandrake, it's just a very bad idea to
choose something
	else than the default and a few options.	With Debian, I used Netinst, and
installed the few 	things I needed; Everything went smoothly when I need to
install new packages.
	* Stability: Mandrake 8.1's SysVInit is really bad ( Shuting down does not
work properly )
	* Packaging: the packaging system does work. With Mandrake, it happens
often that the db storing all the info about the installed packages gets
destroyed by the DrakInst, the GUI Installer. Once this happened, there
isn't much you can do but reinstall everything from scratch.
	* sources: compilation is working all the time.

	Cheers,
	Lucas