[Sheflug] On behalf of Richard

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

>>>>> "Sean" == Sean Liddall <Sean.Liddall [at] vuw.ac.nz> apparently
>>>>> quotes Richard:

    >> with my laptop was because Owen le Blanc over at Manchester had
    >> enormous problems with PCMCIA drivers.

Yeah, I guess it's likely that Red Hat or SuSE is better for PCMCIA
..

    >> When I mentioned IRDA he did a sort of "oh my god, the world's
    >> coming to an end" in front of me.

.. and IrDA, too, because those are broken out of the box, user
repairs typically required.

So there Debian's normally correct policy of minimal patches to
upstream packages often fails.  The commercial distro policy of
f**king with everything in sight so that apps that work with their
distros are hard to port to other distros is actually a service to the
typical user in that case.

But trying to debug an alpha or beta version of a program in
development on Red Hat is often a crap shoot, since you never know
what's in there without downloading and analyzing the .spec files.

Red Hat and SuSE et al really are about applying Microsoft methodology
to distributing open source.  Like Microsoft, they will put the
systems on the desks of people who couldn't possibly deal with Debian,
and that's a good thing.  What's nice about open source is that it can
also support a distro like Debian, which puts a check on the natural
desire of companies like Red Hat to trade compatibility for features
or bug fixes.  (As does the competition among commercial companies, to
some extent.)

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