Distribution comparison [was: X terminals help...]

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> Al == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

Al> sheflug - http://www.sheflug.co.uk On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Stephen
Al> J. Turnbull wrote:

Al> Nice choice (self confessed Mandrake addict here)
>> Why?
>>
>> (Debian user here ;-)

Al> What I don't like about Debian: (not trying to start a flame
Al> war, honestly!!)

Then why didn't you start by answering why you are a Mandrake addict?

I know Red Hat (many bad experiences), TurboLinux (a good distribution
for Asian locales, but I got sick of it in the beta program), Debian,
several Japanese distributions, and I've heard a lot about Caldera and
SuSE. So what do you like about Mandrake?

To respond to some of Al's points (valid - the point here is not a
rebuttal but to show what I think Debian is good for).

Al> 1. It's out of date

slink is stable as a tectonic plate. If I needed a 24x7 platform I'd
run slink and build what more recent stuff I needed for it myself.

I don't at the moment, so I run potato, which has tomorrow's code
today.

This dichotomous choice is _not_ suitable for people who just want a
machine that can achieve 24 hours uptime and a monthly upgrade for
important apps without falling over and needing an
fdisk-and-reinstall. Ie, RedHat et al are excellent upgrades from
Windose. (Install VMware and they can be a superset of Windose if you
need that.)

But they suffer from many of the same problems. In particular, they
make it extremely frustrating for even a moderately clueful admin to
patch up if the autoconfigurators blow it. You can do it, but you
pretty quickly find yourself with a hand-tuned system that the
configurators can't handle at all.

Al> 2. I don't like apt

I don't like anything GUI; curses is barely acceptable to my taste.
;-) I find that running apt under dselect and apt-get from the command
line gives me the flexibility I need to deal with the pace of updates
to potato (I would estimate a package release an hour).

This is not optimal, but apt speeds up the process by an order of
magnitude over the old dselect + dpkg-ftp method.

Al> 3. It's out of date

It's all volunteers, and they (correctly, IMHO) put stability before
modernization. Debian is not a mass-market distribution with
something for everybody. The release version is intended to be an
extremely stable baseline, and the unstable version is a developer
platform.

Al> 4. It runs 2.0.*

2.2 kernels aren't stable yet. Maybe 2.2.13. But I had (possible,
I'm not sure the blame goes to the kernel) data loss under 2.2.11, I
think it was, and I've heard bad things about 2.2.12.

Al> Of course, this is all personal preference: I don't
Al> particularly go around recommending distributions, unless
Al> you're a first-timer, in which case it's usually Corel, COL,
Al> Mandrake or SuSE. I'm just glad there's choice ;)

Why Mandrake? That was the original question.

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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