[Gllug] What's so good about Debian?

[FORSTER, David]

Hi,

Thanks to all who've replied... It's not that I'm a computer newbie, just a
Linux newbie and I've not had any experience with any Un*x based systems
before so everything's all just a little... er... different. I understand
the concepts and principles behind things but I get stuck on the trivial
things. Like the other day for some reason I couldn't start a shell script
by just typing it's filename, I had to precede it with a './' and still
haven't figured out why. The problem is that I'm so used to programming in
the M$ and VB environment that it's now difficult to do anything else and I
find it very frustrating :o)

Anyway... thanks for the advice... I might try and get my hands on a set of
Debian ISOs and give it a try on a spare 4Gb drive I've got.

David.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Whyte [mailto:ben at whyte-systems.co.uk]
Sent: 09 October 2003 10:06
To: Greater London Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Gllug] What's so good about Debian?


Hi,

No need to apologise for the newbie question we were all newbies at one 
time or another.

Distributions are mainly a collection of apps but they each have there 
own way of deciding whats in their distribution and how it is packaged, 
what support they have and how they handle certain things like hardware 
detection for example.

Like any distribution Debian has its plus points and its bad points.  I 
use Debian myself personally having switched from Red Hat predominantly 
because a friend of mine kept telling me how fantastic apt is.  I 
personally love Debian now but it does have a steep learning curve to 
start with.

My advice to anyone, is try a few distributions until you find one you 
like and once you have done stick with it.  If you fancy trying another 
one if you have the disk space just add a new partition and give it a try.

So if your happy with Mandrake and Redhat, stick with them.

Ben



FORSTER, David wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> This is quite obviously a newbie question, so I apologise in advance :o)
> 
> I went to the Linux Expo yesterday and was chatting to a guy about various
> things and I explained how I've just gotten into Linux. I told him that I
> was using Mandrake 9.1 and was planning to install Red Hat 9 on another PC
> soon and he started to evangelise (to coin an industry phrase) about
Debian
> to me and I couldn't understand why. My understanding was that a Distro
was
> purely a collection of various different applications, all of which are
> based around the Linux kernel. Have I missed something and is Debian
really
> different in some way or was this just a case of 'Distro Worship' :o)
> 
> David.



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