At the risk of starting a huge religious war: 1. Preseed vs. kickstartIf you're only running at home or only a few machines at work, you're not going to run into this. Once you're done a RH install a .ks file is dropped under /root. You can now use this file to kickstart identical machines in PXE in a couple of minutes. There is no such automatic generation in Debian. You have to create the preseed by hand, and testing a preseed file isn't so fun as you need to pretty much reboot -> test over and over after you change stuff.
2. The disarray of configuration files vs centralized system config dirIn RH you have /etc/sysconfig. Almost every single system configuration file is under here. In Debian, anything goes.
3. RPM vs DPKG query subsystem.No, not yum vs. apt-get or aptitude or aptsomethingelse. To find information with dpkg seems difficult and unwieldy. Example: Say you want to find what package a specific file belongs to. With dpkg you should a dpkg-query -s to search the cache. I don't like that. I just want to know what package a given file on the filesystem belongs to. rpm -qf $FILE, done. The query system is general in rpm is simple yet robust. dpkg-query just doesn't do it for me. And I also don't like how there are a bunch of dpkg-* files that split up various functions of the dpkg system.
Before all of Debian users pass a brick, this is mostly preference, except #1 is pretty hard to deny that RH makes your life a *lot* easier in that dept.
Stefan Monnier wrote:
it's pretty flawless. And I do agree about the ease of dist-> new dist in-place upgrades. I just find that my most common tasks are simply easier on RHEL/CentOS.I'm curious: which tasks are these, and in which way are they made easier? [ to give you some context: I only admin my own 4-5 home machines and have only vaguely used RedHat a bit some 10 years ago. I use Debian mostly because they better agreed with my view of the world back when I got to choose. ] Stefan