Re: Why use Debian? Why not Red Hat?

["Keith G. Murphy" <keithmur@mindspring.com>]

Mark Brown wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 31, 1999 at 06:11:13PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
> 
> [Slow releases]
> >     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.
> 
> It's not just the time between releases that's important.  For various
> reasons (long freezes and unfortunate timing among them) Debian has
> produced releases which were behind the state of the art when they were
> released - X and the kernel in slink, for example.  This gives the
> impression that Debian releases are much older than they actually are.
> 
> Aside from things like the kernel and X (which provide hardware support
> that some people need) there's not much wrong with old software, but
> people still seem to want the new stuff (right now GNOME is the hot
> thing).
> 
> I'd guess that a large proportion of the people who want more than just
> more up to date hardware support really want to be riding unstable.
> 
Almost seems like the problem is truth in advertising.  Maybe unstable
should be called "cutting-edge"?  ;-)