[A83] Re: VoyageT_200 [OT]
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[A83] Re: VoyageT_200 [OT]
Debian is cool for a lot of reasons. Perhaps one of the most important
reasons is the structure. Debian works like Linux. It is not produced by a
company, but instead by a group of volunteers. Everything about it is open,
public and free. Every decision made regarding Debian should be about what
is best for Debian, and not for a company. Make no mistake about RedHat.
They are a publically traded company. This isn't so say that they don't do
a lot of great stuff for the community, and they do, but by law, they are
required to do what is in the best interest of their stock holders.
Debian has politics, just like everything else. Everything in Debian must
meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). This essentially means
that everything must be open source, i.e. GPL, BSD licensed, MIT licensed,
etc. Debian must also deal with things that are not allowed to be exported
outside of the US, namely encryption, but also things covered by patents,
such as MP3 encoders. Ask someone why LAME isn't included in Debian. That
will give you an idea of the politics behind Debian. You'll see articles on
Slashdot about this issue from time to time, such as the recent one
regarding the LDP licenses. This has the upside of having a totally free
distribution, that you can use in a corporate environment, without worrying
about license complicance.
Debian has a lot of very talented and hard working developers. Things in
Debian work, or they get fixed. Everything works together. There are
strict guidelines for packages, and all packages must meet these guidelines.
These guidelines maintain quality, and assure that things work together.
With RedHat, you end up hunting around for RPM's, and go through "version
hell". Try to install one package, and it needs a different version of
another, which is already installed, and so on. With Debian, you have just
one command, apt-get, that automatically takes care of everything for you,
correctly. There is also debconf, which provides a unified way of doing
package configuration. There is no such equivalent in RPM land. When you
install packages on Debian, they almost always work immediately, with some
sets of defaults. Many packages ask you some questions to get a better idea
on how to set themselves up. For example, the mail package (exim) asks you
some questions, and you get an entirely working mail server, without needing
to do anything extra.
Debian has "correct" ways of doing everything. Ideally, you never install
anything from source. Everything comes packaged, has a package builder, or
you package it yourself. There are psuedo packages for things like the
NVidia drivers, that can't be packaged do to licensing issues. These
packages download the source from NVidia's site, and build you a Debian
package, ready to be installed. Thus everything on your system stays
versioned and working correctly.
Custom kernels are very nice to do in Debian. You can easily build a kernel
on one machine, and install it on a dozen others, modules and all, from a
single kernel package. make-kpkg builds a kernel package from the kernel
source. The kernel and all the modules get built into one package. None of
this "make modules_install" stuff that puts things who knows where. You can
keep all your old kernels, and easily switch between them.
There are lots of other reasons why you would want to use Debian, but I
suggest that you try it and see for yourself.
> While this is off-topic, what are some other reasons (besides package
> management) for using Debian over RedHat? I've used RedHat since I was a
> newb, but I've heard that Debian is much better.
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