[Glastonbury] debian@stdunstans (was Just a little idea)

[Martin Wheeler]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Sean Miller wrote:

> We seem to be experiencing Debian bigotry again...

Not 'bigotry' -- advocacy.


>  What is actually wrong with Mandrake?

Nothing.  I //prefer// Debian, is all.

Why?
It gives me greater flexibility than any other distribution in what I 
install and how I install it; I've been using it for eight years so I'm 
well-used to it; I don't have to pay anything for support, or join a 
'club', or wish I could afford the 'Enterprise' version to get the 
features I want; I upgrade my home network each night and thereafter 
upgrade individual machines from a local repository; etc. etc.
Plus the Debian concept of a Social Contract goes well with my personal 
outlook on social and political philosophy.  Ingrained capitalist 
attitudes are soo-o-o 20th C.


> I have heard that their package manager puts apt-get to shame...

  ... then indeed you //have// been talking to bigots.

OK -- acid test.

Take a bare-bones version of Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Slackware -- 
no Apache, no MySQL, no PHP, etc. -- and install in one easy go something 
like phpmyadmin.

Now tell me which distribution solves your problem with least trouble.

(What?  Your favourite distribution won't let you install a bare-bones 
version in under five minutes?  You mean you're stuck with mega-bloat you 
don't want, because if you don't accept it from the start you then won't 
be able to do what you want?  And it can't sort out all the complex 
dependencies between Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl and Python 
simultaneously?  What sort of distribution *is* this that you're 
championing?  Oh, I see -- you only install Linux once every six months?
And you can't see any reason why anyone in their right minds would be 
doing six different installs in one day?
Welcome to the real world and life in the classroom, buddy.)

:)
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
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