Hello,
I am new to the Debian distribution and I would like to hear opinions from experienced users on why someone should choose them as OS.The reasons I chose them is that Debian is considered a stable and reliable OS (the policy of the OS is not to include as many and as much quickly as possible new features), and that it has a large and dependable community.
Personally, I chose Debian because of it's amazing package installer "apt". Like many people, I started with Windows (well, my first computer was earlier than that, but irrelevant to this discussion). Software management was (and - although "winget" is making it better - still kind of is) a bit of a nightmare. You'd either have to got to the developer's website and download an installer or, if you were lucky, there are sites like TUCOWS and Sourceforge where you could download several installers. But windows has always tended to favour the idea of an installer, rather than a package to be installed. Sure, MSI files exist, but they're still kind of second rate compared to an EXE installer.
So, when I was venturing into Linux, I started off with Mandrake Linux (which I got from a CD on a magazine). Mandrake Linux introduced me to the concept of a Software Repository - a single server hosting just about any programs you could want. Want a spreadsheet application? Install StarOffice. Want games? There's plenty of those, too. All available for free. However, Mandrake is a RedHat-based distribution so, although there was so much software available through the repository, these were the days before "yum". So to install a package, you had to download the RPM for what you wanted, then try to install it, then download all the dependencies that it needed and try to install those, then download all the dependencies THEY required and so on.
A friend of mine, however, used Debian Linux and "apt" was a revelation. With apt (I think we used "dselect" in those days, but "apt-get" worked just as well if you knew what you wanted to install), it was just a single command. "apt-get install soffice" was enough to install StarOffice and all the libraries it required. This was a minor miracle to me, and I've never really looked back.
Of course, nowadays, you can do the same thing with "yum" and
"dnf" on RedHat based distros, and even Windows is getting to the
point where plenty of software is available through "winget
install xxx", but I'm happy to stick with Debian.
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