[Gllug] Debian hopeless

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2004-03-08 at 21:47, Christopher Hunter wrote:
> On Monday 08 Mar 2004 12:01 pm, Matthew King wrote:
> > I do find it fascinating how Linux being unable to load a network driver
> > module makes Debian hopeless.
> >
> > Anyone care to explain that one?
> 
> Perhaps you didn't quite get what he meant.....
> 
> Nowadays, you'd expect any good distro to be very good at detecting hardware 
> and automagically loading the right driver or module for it.  

Depends on your definition of good. I consider Debian to be the best
mainstream Linux distro out there, but I'd happily concede that the
installers hardware detection is poor. That said, I really don't care
very much - all I want from an installer is something that can talk to
the disk controller and the NIC. I'll build a kernel with all the
appropriate drivers for the machine afterwards. That approach seems to
be going out of fashion these days, but I've always run with stock
kernels, not distro supplied ones. Debian even makes it easy for me by
providing kernel package.

> My experience has been that Suse and Mandrake usually get it right - Debian 
> has always been real grief to install and configure (for me!), so I've 
> avoided it for a good while.  Debian's probably better than it was, but I'll 
> still stick with distros that I find easy to install, configure and maintain.

Those three things don't always go hand in hand. Debian is easier to
maintain, by far, than any other distro I've used. Debconf makes
configuration of many packages trivial, and the ones it doesn't manage
tend to be the ones that need a deeper understanding anyway. Given a
system which can be seamlessy upgraded from one major release to
another, the importance of the installer lessens.

Mike.

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