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On 01/19/2013 05:07 PM,
venturehw@yahoo.com wrote:
Maybe the primary problem comes with Debian's more zealous adherance to the Free Software philosophy. It is a good thing, for the most part, but it has some disadvantages, particularly in the realm of hardware and the sort of support a lot of open source drivers offer, specifically with display drivers or wireless networking.. Biggest example of this having a downside for Debian is official debian media not providing "nonfree" firmware for wifi chipsets, making it often much more difficult to install the system if you can't simply wire up. I've also got to be perhaps a little frank... Debian's multilib/java support has always been a bit of a low point for me. Debian does offer non-free software in unsupported repositories, but at install time these are usually not accessible. Don't misinterpret this as me not likign Debian, I really do like Debian for servers (I use Debian on my server.). I don't generally find it as ideal for desktops as many other distributions for the reasons above. Debian Stable is maybe not the best for desktops if you're interested in having more up-to-date software. The concept behind Stable is near-implausible levels of quality control on the packages. There is testing and unstable. Testing is actually maybe better thought as the "Debian best for desktops" by many because it gets into that balance of "recent" packages with a still somewhat reasonable amount of stability. Sid is not recommended for anything but actual testing and quality control purposes. It's full rolling release but because it's about developing packages as opposed to providing a full-on usable system as rolling release, it's not ideally suited for desktops or servers. If you like rolling release and want to use it as a "stable" Linux system I'd recommend Arch instead. But I digress. Debian is a wonderful system! Great community, very high quality packages, and easy to get help for. Just watch out for the caveats that come with a "Free Software" mentality. Conrad |