[lug] Debian is better?

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Timothy C. Klein wrote:

> I have found this to be far superior in Debian that RedHat, Slackware,
> Suse, etc.  A Debian package, the great majority of the time, is ready
> and up and running as soon as it installs.  apt-get install <package> is
> all the configuration you need to do a bunch of the time.  The Debian
> developers work hard to give a very sane default install.  This is true,
> even, of a lot of the daemons.

  Yup, same here.  I started out with Redhat 6.1 because I was pulling my
hair out that Windows crashed every 2 hours.  About 6 month later I
switched to Debian because I was pulling my hair out that I couldn't
install a single @#$!@ .rpm package without spending another hour finding
all the dependencies it needed.  I'm sure none of you RedHat users have
ever had that happen though.  I never used --nodeps, yet I was somehow
able to dig myself in several dependency holes.

  I was also rooted.  The update service cost money then, so I just
checked the errata pages for serious bugs.  The bug that was used on me
was not even in the Redhat database any more, but the Redhat person I
email knew about it from "way back".  Like 6 months before that.

Debian is not perfect, and I have noticed an increase in bugs in general
in the Woody release (I would guess that it is now only slightly less
buggy than RedHat).  It's not a starter distro, but all in all, I think it
is easier to admin, install, and upgrade packages than RedHat.

I noticed that RedHat was an easier install on my laptop last time I
tried, but Woody installs so easy on the desktop I'm not sure what the
difference is.  X worked for me without any adjustments.  Right now Debian
is behind in the "easy to install" area, but look at Knoppix, which is a
Debian distro.  It boots off a CD into X with networking configured on
every computer I have tried it on (three now).

  I'm glad RedHat is out there, though, and I hope they keep making money
(they're in the black now, right?)  They have really supported a lot of
good stuff, like autotools development (thanks, Tom!)