[Sussex] Hi

[Geoff Teale]

On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 16:18 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:

> If you like fluffy superfluous crap, it's lovely. GUI supreme. Yuck.
> Debian rules, and that's that. :)
> 

As a user and developer on several distros (we base our product on
Debian, I have done development work on Gentoo, I was for a while a
Fedora developer and I am currently working on tools for the Arch Linux
distribution) I am here to say that Debian is not the be all and end all
of distros.  For all the power of it's package management system you pay
a massive price in terms of the complexity of rolling-your own packages
and when things go wrong they go __really__ wrong.  Moreover anyone
seriously considering managing a large number of desktop machines
running Debian in it's "out of the box" condition is fooling themselves
- and if you move to unstable, or start rolling your own packages to
support hardware built in the last 18 months you sacrifice a lot of the
things that are core to Debian's principles (i.e. Stability and
testing).

Now I am not saying that any other distro is inherently better, they all
have problems, and yes Debian is an extremely useful and an extremely
influential distribution, but the way some Debian users around here talk
you'd think it was the only solution.

-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology     /   Free Software Foundation
gteale at cmedltd.com  /   tealeg at member.fsf.org

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