Re: why debian
ken keanon wrote:
Hi,
There are so many distros out there its confusing. Any reason(s) why
Debian should be the preferred choice?
Difficult question. The Debian project is wonderful from many
perspectives, but except on philosophical grounds it's hard to see why
an ordinary desktop user would choose it in preference to SuSE,
Mandrake, Xandros or another distro known to be friendly to the new user
and where a lot of effort has been put into pulling the desktop
together. I've just installed SuSE 9.2 this afternoon and it wipes the
floor with my Debian installation (sarge and elements of sid). In terms
of a nicely tweaked, stable, elegant-looking system with full multimedia
toys, open office, KDE 3.31, samba, etc. I am further ahead after about
four hours of SuSE than I was after about a month of Debian. In fact
I've had to waive goodbye to Debian by installing SuSE 9.2 over it. The
final straw was lack of dma support in the 2.6.8-1 Debian kernel (so far
as I can tell after much googling) which meant no DVDs and crappy sound.
I don't see why anyone should have to start recompiling kernels just for
that.
Debian must be fantastic as a server OS (though I've never had trouble
in three and a half years with SuSE for httpd, ftp, mail, so far) but it
seems too rough on the desktop, lacking in polish and with the Debian
system of commands in many ways more complicated than the rpm and
YaST-based stuff on SuSE (which can also now be set up for the apt
system). Server specialists and developers aside, maybe Debian's final
destiny is as a huge resource for "middleman" distros like Ubuntu or
Xandros. I'm looking forward to having another go on a multiboot when
I've got a second HD, though in an iteration or two's time Ubuntu looks
as if it could be really good.
:)
Fish
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