> Hi people! > > This may sound like a stupid or minor question but i'd really like > to hear from all of you why do you think Debian is great, in > comparison to ALL of the other Linux distributions out there! > > For me , the Apt package managing tool solely is like 50% of the > reasons i like Debian for! ;)
apt is certainly good. but one of the main reasons i like it is it's stability. it doesn't change often. i am strongly against upgrading often when the upgrades involve radical new versions of software. upgrading on debian is pretty smooth, I have not used another OS where upgrading was as smooth, most others the best way to upgrade is to a clean install. i have heard of many horror stories of people trying to upgrade redhat systems, or mandrake .. and i have my own horror story about trying to upgrade openbsd. i hear freebsd 4.5 is on the horizon, i shall see how upgrading one of my test freebsd 4.4 boxes goes when it appears. most of my workstations are running testing but i only upgrade once every month or 2(or longer). all but 2 of my servers are running potato(~35-40 potato, 2 testing). also i find the mirroring of the archive around the world very powerful, i have a few redhat systems and it has always been a royal pain trying to find a working redhat mirror when their main site was full(which happens pretty often it seems). the naming scheme (http.XX.debian.org) vs what redhat has(last time i checked they had no naming scheme) makes it easy to guess mirror sites without having to find a page that lists the actual mirrors. and packages.debian.org is EXTREMELY useful. being able to input a filename and find what package it belongs to, and/or searching for a package name. from what i understand the newer apt utils have this built in, but that functionality is not in potato last i checked.(though apt-cache is ..) and of course the massive selection of packages is a plus, less to download from other sources. a few days ago one of the employees at the company i work for asked to have emacs installed on a system, and my fellow co worker managed to install it within seconds, and he isn't someone i would consider to be real strong in unix, but he knew apt-cache, and he knew apt-get, all he had to do was wait for it to download and install and thats it. i joked about it with him saying "yeah it can be a real pain in the ass to install software", "damn that apt-get, sometimes you gotta do an update before trying to install, such a waste of time", had a good laugh. nate