plug RedHat Vs Debian Vs RedHat Vs Debian

[Matt Kemner]

On Wed, 10 Jun 1998, Shackleton, Kevin wrote:

> Would anyone like to do an _unbiased_ rundown of RH vs Debian? 

I doubt there is anybody on this list that could do this :P
all the "experienced" linuxers on this list are either pro-RH or
pro-Debian, mostly depending on whatever they started with first (or so I
assume)

> I assume
> there's strengths & weaknesses in both, consequently each should be
> suited to particular applications.

Personally I think RedHat is maybe a better "start-off" distribution,
since they seem to aim at the end-user, making the OS as userfriendly as
possible.  Debian seems to work better out of the box for me, setting up
servers for the ISP I work for.  The main reason I personally chose Debian
over RedHat inittially (about 2 years ago) is because at the time RedHat
was riddled with security holes.  Debian has it's faults too, and there
are a few things that are very annoying, which is why I tend to use Debian
only to install a machine from scratch, and to update things like the
shared libs, utilities, etc and then compile the "important" stuff like
apache, squid etc myself.

(one thing that REALLY annoys me about Debian is that everytime I
upgraded from 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3, the "defaults" for apache changed, so
things started breaking silently... I don't know how RedHat fares in this 
position though..)

Short answer to your question:

The only thing you will ever know which is the best distribution for you,
is to try them all out. (and not just for a day or so each, but running
them for a week or so, getting used to the package handling etc, because
you will probably find that if you've used one of them all your "linux
life" and then "trial" out the other for a day, you will instantly hate it
because it does everything different)

 - Matt