"Newton, Philip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >So, what distro do people prefer and why? What's better in Debian than in >Distro <X>? What's bad about distro <X>?
Currently, I'm running DeadRat (have been for about 5 years now). Why? Because I was young and foolish and that's what was on the CDs I found. I don't do a lot of tinkering, but when I do it's all pretty clear and there are 1001 pages of information about it on the web. Not to mention shed-loads of packages. Having said that, as soon as I get the nod from management (i.e. time away from urgent (to them) development), I'm frying my laptop to put Debian on it. Ideologically, Debian is a lot closer to my understanding of what open source is about. And let's not mention the fact that Debian's package management system "manages packages" unlike RPM which is increasingly about as reliable as Install Shield (particularly when uninstalling), and about as useful as mamary glands on a male bovine if you can't satisfy the package dependencies when you're trying to install. When updating packages in RH, after a relatively short time I find that I have a dirty install and it's almost worth doing a fresh install to clean the system out. Colleagues who use Debian say that it doesn't suffer from as much residue when performing system maintenance. One other thing that is drawing me to Debian is the speed with which the distribution moves. Unstable packaged with no bug reports for two weeks are placed straight into testing. They also do a lot of testing to ensure the modules/packages work across multiple architectures. Debian, to me, is put together by a lot of guys who work hard doing what they love. That's always going to produce great code. I don't have any esperience with SuSE, and I haven't touched Slackware since early 1996. If you're running servers, however, I can highly recommend FreeBSD. Again, it's been over 3 years since I touched it, but back then it was very stable and friendly towards typical server-type activities. Ian _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
