Re: Why Debian?
1. Its free
2. Apt
On Fri, 2002-03-01 at 10:40, Kent West wrote:
> Johan van der Walt wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > At present I have an older version of RedHat running on my pc.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Basically I feel that I have to pick one from the following
> > four: Debian, SuSe, RedHat and Slackware.
>
> <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?
>
> <snip>
>
> > Someone told me the other day that Debian is the most stable
> > distribution. Is that so and why?
>
> I would venture to say that is true. The main reason is that Debian
> releases are not "Official" until it's ready to be released. This is in
> contrast with certain other distros that are released because the
> marketing guys promised it this quarter. Debian is also the easiest to
> maintain, which in a sense, translates to stability. On a related note,
> it has been the observation of several posters to this list over the
> past 4 or so years that Debian's "unstable" branch is just as stable as
> the "other" distro's full release version.
> The question of "Why Debian" comes up on this list every few months. I
> would recommend you search the Debian Mailing List archives (see the
> link on the left-hand side of http://www.debian.org) over the past
> couple of years and you'll probably get a lot of answers.
>
> For me, the two biggest answers are:
>
> 1) Philisophically pure. Debian has strict standards as to what is and
> isn't included in its base distribution. For example, for a while it
> didn't include KDE because KDE was based on a library that had somewhat
> restrictive licensing. That licensing has since changed, so that KDE is
> now included. In other words, if it's not truly free software, it
> doesn't make it in the base distro. This way, you never have to worry if
> you've installed software that if you run it at home there's no problem,
> but if you put it in at a business, you have to pay a license fee. This
> fact alone makes Debian the safest choice. I'm sure your boss would hate
> to get sued because you installed a distro at work that included trial
> software that expired a month after you installed it, which you didn't
> remove after that trial period.
>
> 2) apt. Well, really, there are other tools in other distros that
> approximate apt/dselect/dpkg, but the big difference is that Debian
> again has strict standards as to what is and isn't included in its
> distribution. What this translates to is that when you want to install a
> package on some other distro, you find that that package depends on X,
> and X depends on Y, and Y depends on Z, and Z conflicts with X so that
> you can't install Z without removing X which breaks your install. On
> Debian, the strict packaging policies means that all these dependencies
> are worked out beforehand by the package maintainers, so that you don't
> have to. As a result, when you want to install evolution, you just type
> "apt-get install evolution" and then go to the coke machine to buy a
> drink, come back, and then start using evolution. Very sweet.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Kent
>
>
>
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--
Arthur H. Johnson II
The Linux Box
http://www.linuxbox.nu
arthur@linuxbox.nu
--
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