[sclug] Gave up on Gentoo

[Simon Huggins]

On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 11:16:13AM +0000, Neil Haughton wrote:
> Any Debian users out there who could give me some hand-holding to wean
> me off the Mandrake/Red Hat approach and into the Debian way of doing
> things? Particularly how to find and install/configure new
> applications.

I /think/ ubuntu uses synaptic as its main installer but you could you
apt (apt-get install pkgname, apt-cache search blah), aptitude (a more
powerful package manager which uses apt as its backend to install
packages), or dselect (an older powerful package manager that I find
counterintuitive but some people love).

The Debian Reference at:
http://www.uk.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/reference.en.html
is well worth a read if you're new to Debian based distributions (and
possibly even if you're not) though obviously some of that is Debian
specific as opposed to Ubuntu specific (they have different divisions in
their archive like "universe" and so on).

> How do sclug users rate Debain distro's?

I'm biased because I run Debian everywhere (at work, at home, on my
laptop etc) but I find that the packages are well integrated and that
thought has gone into making them integrated.  There are efforts to
ensure you have a consistent menu across window managers, that no matter
which browser/editor/X terminal you have installed it'll be run when you
expect to launch one (either via the alternatives system or via things
like sensible-browser).  It's less about just packaging a piece of
software and more about packaging a piece of software as part of a whole
distribution.

I like Debian's philosophy which arguably you sort of lose if you go to
Ubuntu - the fact it's all volunteers and there's a clear set of rules
ensures it'll be around for a while.

But yeah, ask some of the Redhat/Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, Slackware or
Gentoo crowd why they don't run it.  I imagine some of the responses
you'll get for Debian will be "it's old software" because Debian itself
is well overdue a release.  Ubuntu doesn't have that problem though.

Simon.

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