Re: why debian
On Sunday 14 November 2004 21:34, Mark Crean wrote:
> 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.
I am interested to know how the other distributions deal with updating of the
software - since I have never used anything other than Debian, and don't have
any feeling that there is any need to switch.
I started on Debian about 4 years ago when I first started with Linux. I have
always had a desktop that is reasonably up to date - I was probably using kde
1 when I started, I now an running linux kernel 2.6.9, kde 3.3.1, all the
multimedia toys I could want, open office 1.1.2 - and I have kept it up to
date originally using dselect, but now aptitude. Upgrading has never really
been a problem (despite using unstable) every few days I just use aptitude to
update my list of packages and then tell it to bring the system up to this
state.
Once I find I don't need a package anymore I can just un-install it, and it
and all of its automatic dependencies are automatically removed, so
effectively I never really have a re-install.
Seems to me that this 'ordinary desktop user' can't see any reason not to use
Debian and risk loosing what I have.
--
Alan Chandler
alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win. --Gandhi
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