Ueli Meier wrote:
What where your reasons to switch to debian?Could you explain more? What does it mean Debian is not tuned for the desktop, more work to install? Or is there more to it?
I used to use Suse on a couple of servers an workstations. I got fed up by it, when I realized that my shiny new Suse-laptop would not work 'out of the box' with our Suse-server, which was one or two 'versions' behind; ie. file exchange and printing would not work. I switched the laptop to debian and later instead of upgrading the servers and other workstations to newer Suses, I installed debian on all our machines.
Main advantage: debian is a lot easier to maintain, once set up; less bugs.Main disadvantage: maybe it takes a bit longer to configure graphics, mouse etc. for first time users.
> What is more flexibility, can I install less pakages than with other > desktops and save harddisk space and memory?Well, probably any distribution has a package managment system to allow selection of more or less packages for installation. Debian's apt is said to be superior to rpms in checking for you what additional packages are required, if you want to install application xyz. It also automatically removes these additional packages, when at a later stage you decide to remove xyz. In that sense, it's probably easier to decide which packages you can savely remove to save disk space, if the default 'workstation' setting is to bulky.
On installation you could start with a minimal setup and then manually add all packages you need. Selecting things like 'kde' would install a lot of other packages as well, but only the essential stuff, ie openoffice et al. can be installed seperately.
Johannes