Why I use Debian. Was Re: [plug] Mandrake - printing

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Barbara Robson wrote:
> I am currently running Redhat on my work box and Debian on my 
> computer at home.  I chose Redhat at work because it is better
> supported here, because rpm packages are more widely available 
> than deb packages (and while tarballs are fine, there are definite
> advantages to using a package manager wherever possible)

I disagree. To me, a package is only better than a tarball if it has been
made correctly, and is compatible with any other packages you might want
to install. This is true of any package you can find at debian.org or
redhat.com or associated mirror. This is not true of the average RPM you
find on a website - they might be packaged in the RPM format, but they
won't necessarily follow Redhat's guidelines, and hence they won't
necessarily work smoothly on your system, or be cleanly 
upgradable/removable when the time comes.

In the absence of an official package, I'd rather download a raw tarball  
and install everything in /usr/local/foo, then make the requisite
modifications to the system myself. That way, I know how my system differs
from a standard system, and what I have to remove when the time comes.

> I also find Debian's package management more intuitive and easier to
> use than Redhat's system, but that may come down to personal taste.
I think dpkg versus rpm is personal taste, and dselect vs. glint/whatever
is mostly personal as well, but APT has no counterpart under Redhat or any
other distribution, and qualitatively distinguishes Debian from other
distributions. A simple "apt-get install" is definitely more intuitive
than a list of seperate, strictly-ordered "rpm --install"s and "rpm
--remove"s - no personal taste about it.

-Greg