[NBLUG/talk] Debian vs. Others

[E Frank Ball]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 12:03:35PM -0800, Ron Balch wrote:

} I have noticed that it seems that alot of people prefer Debian over
} other distrobutions.  I am currently using Mandrake, would there be any
} benefit to me use Debian instead?

I've been gravitating towards Debian, from RedHat and the others.

I used to have a couple of SuSE and a couple of Turbo boxes.  My laptop
still runs Mandrake.  My desktop at home is redhat.  Everything else at
home (5 boxes) is Debian.  At work I'm 100% RedHat (15 Linux boxes + 1
Windows 2000 and 2 HP-UX 10.20).  At work I'm using closed source
software that requires RedHat, so there is no other option.

Debian's apt-get is really really nice.  It also works well on Redhat
boxes now that Connectiva (a Brazilian distribution) ported it over.  I
hear "autoupdate" works well too, but I haven't tried it
(http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate/).  apt for rpm
requires a server setup for apt, autoupdate works for any RedHat
server.

Redhat does have some really annoying ideas for what rpms they consider
essintial for all machines (why does a server running 24/7 need anacron?
for one example).  Redhat has also been dropping many programs I like
(tin, xv, ical, fvwm, xdaliclock, etc).  What RedHat has over Debian is
much better configuration tools.  The Xconfigurator is way better than
Debians X11 setup program, and there are several others like this.

For a Desktop I'd have to think about which to use, for a server it's a
no-brainer:  Debian.  There is also a huge software collection of .deb
packages, I hardly have to compile anything.  Debian is also trivial to
do version upgrades on, if you have been keeping things up to date you
won't even notice much of a change.  RedHat upgrades (between version
numbers) can be tramatic).

Theoretically apt works with SuSE, but I've tried and failed and I
haven't seen any working examples.  There are no apt servers for
Mandrake, but autoupdate might be made to work.

-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at efball.com