[Nottingham] Debian devotion [was: OE Reply Fixer]

[Graeme Fowler]

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Alex Tibbles wrote:
> i think that debian's biggest obstacle to 'power user'
> adoption is that people go "ooh! it hasn't got version
> x.y of blah-package like RedHat" and drop it. people
> don't seem to realise that stable just works.

Hrm... I've sat on the fence so far over this, but feel I must hop off it 
right now to actually defend RedHat. What the hell am I doing this for? 
you may well ask.

Well, there's a lot of hype over *every* operating system. We all 
evangelise about our own particular favourite, and many make disparaging 
remarks about all the others. Just try to remember that variety is the 
spice of life, you won't know until you've tried etc etc. Your bad 
experience doesn't necessarily mean that the product/distro is bad, just 
that you couldn't get on with it.

I've been using $OS for a long time. I say $OS becuase I use a lot of them 
:)
My present favourite is MacOS X, which Does Exactly What It Says On The
Tin with very little behind-the-scenes faffing about. A current close
second is RedHat version 8.0, because it's the first time I've actually
*used* RedHat, rather than bastardizing it immediately it's installed, in
about three years.

RH8 installed first time, no problems, detected all my hardware (nothing 
too esoteric) and immediately told me a bunch of updates were available. 
Since then (about three weeks or so ago) it's painlessly installed a whole 
slew of updates as they've become available, plus I've downloaded and 
installed a whole bunch of other stuff using the nice graphical widget 
that comes with it.

Now before everyone starts puking and accusing me of selling out, how many 
of us have actually stayed on using a fairly standard-issue distribution 
for more than the metaphorical five minutes before trying to make it 
exactly like the one we were using before? I know that's what I've done 
with every single other distro/version of RH I've tried since 6.2, before 
returning to my comfy "bastardized" RH6.2 install (which only vaguely 
matches the original!) becuase That Was What I Liked.
Finally I've cast my old 6.2 install to the dustbin of history[0] as I've 
managed to quite happily ease myself into a different way of doing things 
(although not quite so different as OS X was from MacOS9!) while still 
managing to get a whole load of the same old stuff running without a 
problem.

> new software is not stable. debian simply offers a
> broader range of answers to the stability/ features
> trade-off than anyone else.

I disagree. Debian *appears* to offer a more stable versioning system, but
like many operating systems they're only as stable as the system you run
on them. The Debian packagers are more savvy to that theory, and are very
good at keeping crappy untested packages out. Still, there's nowt to stop
you breaking your system by self-compiling, is there?

It strikes me that, a little like us Mac users, Debian users tend to be 
very happy and quiet until roused. They then pontificate like the best of 
'em  :)

I guess the outcome of this thread should really be along the lines of: if 
it does what you want it to, that's good. Who else cares what it is? [1]

Graeme

[0] well, consigned it to leaving the disk in, just in case I need to boot 
from it again :)

[1] And yes, I did try Debian once. I didn't like it, because it wasn't 
what I was familiar with!