At the risk of starting a huge religious war:
1. Preseed vs. kickstart
If 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 dir
In 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