[plug] Debian VS Mandrake

[Brock Woolf]

> | And tell me what makes apt-get so fantastic?
> 
> Hmm, a quick history lesson may illuminate this one.  Debian has had
> automatic dependency resolution (in the form of a program named
> "dselect", one of the great user interface disasters of the 20th
> century) since almost forever - possibly even before RPMs had been
> invented.  With apt-get (which has been in Debian for years now) and
> graphical interfaces like aptitude and synaptic, all of that
> dependency-tracking goodness has been made a lot more accessible.

Yeah well I just hear lot of people saying ohhhhhhhh apt-get is so
great, well yeah i hope it is, certainly sounds like it.

> apt-get takes care of working out what packages to fetch (from CD or
> the Internet or wherever) and installing.  It also makes it easy to do
> a full system upgrade in just one command (provided nothing breaks).
> Nowadays other distributions like Mandrake can do this too, with tools
> like URPMI, but it used to be an area which only Debian had put much
> thought into.  Some people claim that apt-get still works better than
> the RPM equivalents.

Yeah, you could most certainly be right, RPM is pretty good, but like
you said about the Debian policy with guidelines for .deb files.
Although the Mandrake officially made RPMS do this, just some 3rd party
ones dont.


> | * Relatively Easy Installer
> 
> Yep, Mandrake does pretty well here.  Debian is gradually improving in
> this regard - it still doesn't have a graphical installer, but people
> are beginning to care about usability.  The new installer features
> automatic hardware detection, configuration of RAID/LVM, and retains
> the flexibility that the old one had.

> | * Rock Solid stability
> 
> !?  That's not the Mandrake I remember ;-)

Yeah well 9.2 and before, true. But Mandrake 10 is their first real step
in this direction. I've had so much joy out of it.

> | * Standard Mandrake works well as a Server (Net Gateway/Mail)
> 
> Debian is considered /the/ server distribution for a lot of people.
> This may be because it's historically been a pain to use for anything
> else :-)
> 
> | * Hardware > Good Support for a wide range of devices.
> 
> Debian is supported on 11 architectures - ranging from i386 to s390
> mainframes to sparc to m68k Macs and Amigas - which is more than any
> other Linux distribution can lay claim to, and competitive with
> NetBSD.  Most hardware supported by other distributions can be made to
> work under Debian, but not necessarily "out of the box".

Nice, but sorry man. I meant hardware as in Mice/FireWire Cards/Sound
Cards/Network Cards/Printers etc... Mandrake sure doesn't support that
much architecture. But i think it at least supports 64-Bit systems as of
recently.

> | * Has RPMs for installation
> 
> Has DEBs for installation :-)

Ha. Nice a true loyal debian man. Although i do see your point

> | * A less proprietry distribution (Like Lindows/Xandros/SuSe
> 
> All of the software in Debian follows the Debian Free Software
> Guidelines.  http://www.debian.org/social_contract
> 
> (Disclaimer: this isn't actually true, and the Debian main
> distribution includes some not-quite-free items such as firmware
> without source or unmodifiable documentation.  Debian is still much
> pickier about this kind of thing than any other distribution I can
> think of.  If you like really pedantic bickering about licensing,
> reading the debian-legal archives might be your idea of fun.)

> | * Mandrake focus on stability and hardware support
> 
> Debian focusses on software freedom, never making stable releases, and
> pointless bickering on mailing lists. :-P

Yeah this is good news, i really don't want to see a future Bill Gates
clone company that makes a Linux distro (It could happen?)

> | * Features XFree4.3 not 4.4 (4.4 is not true to the GPL and has a semi
> | proprietory license)
> 
> Most distributions won't touch XFree 4.4.  And, er, what Craig said.

 Yeah, so i've read. They said Mandrake took the first step and other major distros followed suit,
lucky for Mandrake they did :)

> If you're happy with Mandrake, I'm not sure there's much point
> "switching".  On the other hand, it's probably worth trying.

Cheers Cameron, thanks for your input. I've learned a fair bit from your
email. :) Keep it real

Regards,
 	Brock