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

[Alex Tibbles]

<snip>
> 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 apologise to the list for being unfair - I got
needled by the normally unchallenged 'Debian is
uselessly out-of-date' claim and got into a one-sided
rant.

I've had a particularly poor experience with Redhat
8.0 recently - the default installation is large, and
it took me ages to figure out how to flexibly modify
it. By that point gnome had annoyed me and various
python based tools config kept crashing. I'm looking
forward to the time when LSB conformance if higher
across the distros.

> > 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?
I'm not sure that I get you here. Of course, maniacal
administration can kill any system. (It's harder under
Windows 2000 as the Admininstrator is less powerful
than root, but who needs a sociopathic Administrator
when you have IIS?). I don't see what bearing that has
on anything.
You seem to be saying that the applications that are
available in the distro are part of what determines
how stable it is. Indeed - that is where the choice in
Debian stable to go for stability over features
requires the package set to remain the same. Being
'good at keeping crappy untested packages out' is
exactly what some people want in an operating system.
They want software that works and doesn't change any
more than it needs to.

I admit that some of my like for Debian is political/
ideological/ religious (?), btw.

> 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  :)
probably :) - i know almost no mac users so can't
judge the similarity.... :/

> 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]
I'm not telling anyone that they should use Debian,
that I'm better 'cos I use it, or anything else, I
simply object to people complaining that you can't use
a hammer to open a tin of beans (if you'll excuse my
wierd metaphor).

alex

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