[plug] Ubuntu on older 8.04 on older machines

[Martin Langsjoen]

On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 19:07 +0800, Kai wrote:
> That and the old PIII 600 desktop form factor machine I have sitting 
> here with Fedora 4 on it, wanna wipe that and install with Ubuntu since 
> I find Debian's package management to be so much easier than Fedora/Red 
> Hat RPM's

Debian's package management is easier in some ways than what Fedora and
Red Hat traditionally have had. But this is not so much a technical
issue.

The main difference between Debian and most other Linux distributions
(and operating systems) is Debians strict packaging policies and QA
process. Anyone with enough resources can build a rpm based distro with
the same amount of packages and the same quality. Fedora is slowly going
in that direction, but it is a distro with different goals.

What makes Debian special? Here are some examples:
 - http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
 - http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/index.en.html
 - http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/index.en.html

The documents, the willingness to focus on the policies and to stall
their releases (for somethings that seems to be for ever) over details.
The policies makes Debian better in many ways, but it is also the reason
why many have moved away from the distro.

yum is now a first class citizen of the Red Hat and Fedora world and Red
Hat Enterprise Linux do focus on QA and policies, but they have
different focus, different policies, and different goals.

I used apt-get for years to maintain Red Hat Linux, but yum do the same
thing today.

.rpm and .deb is two very similar solutions to the same problem. It is
the history of the policies that make the difference.

-martin