Re: Why use Debian? Why not Red Hat?
morpheus@rpglink.com (Steve Lamb) writes:
> Tuesday, August 31, 1999, 3:04:45 PM, Steve wrote:
> > - Speed of releases. Volunteers don't have the same amount of time as a
> > commercial operation so the releases tend to be few and far between. They
> > are very solid when they come along but it can be a bit galling if you want
> > to run up-to-date stuff. The choice is to compile it yourself in /usr/local
> > or to follow the unstable branch.
>
> This is a fallacy. The longest Debian release cycle I could find on
> record was 7 months. In fact, that is the average. Red Hat and Slackware
> have both had 7 month long release cycles. The shorter ones were for ugly
> bugs they needed to fix that Debian's release cycle pretty much avoids.
However, Debian seems to have that reputation. Part of it may have
been due to the libc thing. But Debian made sure they got it right!
Some of this may also go back to the VERY early days of Debian. In
the early days much of the "Press" indicated that Debian was not
ready for use, but did show promise.
> So stable release for stable release, Debian is on par with others.
To me, the best things about Debian is that most things work right
"out of the box", because it uses sensible defaults. Also when you
need to fine tune something, it is generally easy to find.
In earlier days I did find some things frustrating. Mainly
documentation. I seemed to run into circular "this document is not
up to date, see other document".
Presently, I am not running an up-to-date release. So thats not too
important to me. In my slakware days, seemed like I was always
impatient for new releases. But things are pretty stable now, and
I do not feel the need to be on the cutting edge at present. In the
back of my head, I keep saying I should update, but never seem to
get around to it.
When I moved to Debian, I had up-to-date CD's for 3 or 4 distributions
in my possesion. I could have gone many ways. I have never regretted
my decision.
And if I want to install a Red Hat package, no problem. Really no
problem for most others either.
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