[CLUE-Talk] Mandrake to Debian

[Matt Gushee]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 03:20:09PM -0600, Dave Price wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 08:49:47AM -0700, Keith Christian wrote:
> > 
> > Could you share what you like about Debian vs. Mandrake?  Mandrake is pretty
> > easy to install as you know and have said.
> > 
> 
> Number One: debian rocks!!!

No quarrel with that. I've been using it for two years, after 3 with
RedHat, and have no plans to switch back.

> That said; the debian install is not the easiest,

It is for me ;-)

Seriously, though, is there something behind this statement other than
the habit of taking for granted that 'graphical == user friendly'? I
can understand that people see Debian's text mode interface and *expect*
it to be harder, but I don't know what if anything is actually harder
about it. My experience has been that the SuSE, Mandrake, etc.
installers are better-looking and more automated, so they may be easier
if you are doing a 100% default install. What Debian does really well
is, when there is a choice to be made, to explain in reasonably clear
English what that choice means. As a result I have almost always been
able to get my Debian installs right the first time, whereas with some
of the "modern" graphical installers of other distributions, I have made
wrong choices and had to start over because I didn't understand what I
was choosing (and that's with 2+ years experience using Linux).

> and the file system
> and startup scripts are a bit different from rehat and clones.

FWIW, I believe that's because Debian is more standards-compliant.

> Debian's package manager (dpkg, apt and friends) is very robust,

Hmm ... I'm not sure 'robust' really explains anything, though I
certainly like Debian's package system. Compared with RPM, Debian has
more powerful tools for manipulating packages (though the advanced
features are sometimes hard to understand), and it provides several ways
of installing packages. But what I like best is that it has a very
intelligent way of classifying packages and managing dependencies.

Debian packages are classified in two ways: there are functional groups
(e.g Networking, Development, Text Processing, etc.) and ... hmm ...
I'll call it 'degrees of necessity': Base, Standard, Important,
Optional, and Extra. You must have all the Base packages installed, most
people use most of the Standard packages, etc.

Debian's package dependencies are broken down into 'required' (package A
requires package B to function at all), 'recommended' (some
functionality of A requires B or something like it), and 'suggested'
(users of A find B helpful). I find that a pretty good model of reality;
whereas with RPM, either A requires B or not, period.

> Debian is committed to gnu-only; you will not find anything but
> gnu/open source packages on official debian mirrors, although there
> are packages for things like opera ready to go on the vendors' sites.

I think that's a little bit misleading: it gives the impression that
Debian's package selection is limited. Actually, my impression is that
there is a larger selection of packages in the Debian archives than you
could get from RedHat or any other single RPM-based vendor. In fact, one
of the stated goals of the Debian project is to offer as much software
as possible, while honoring open source license requirements. Thus the
Debian archives are broken down into Main, Non-free, Non-US, and Contrib
sections. The Main section is the largest and contains packages that
meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which I think is very similar
but not identical to being GPL-compatible). Non-free contains
widely-used packages that have non-free licenses (though they are free
of charge) --e.g. Netscape 4.x. Non-US, which is mirrored at many
locations outside the US, contains packages that can't be exported from
the US due to cryptography issues (though of course they can be imported
into the US). Contrib ... I forget. Anyway, the official Debian CD set
includes the Main and Non-US sections; the others you have to get off
the 'Net.

Another thing I like about Debian, at least philosophically, is that it
maintains three versions at any given time: 'stable','testing', and
'unstable'--and is very conservative about adding new features to the
stable version. That means that 'stable' is really stable.
Unfortunately that's not always true with other Linux distributions:
RedHat, for example, is very aggressive in adding new functionality,
which has led to serious quality problems in some of their releases.
True, those were mostly 'point-oh' releases, and people these days seem
to expect point-oh releases of anything to be broken ... but I think,
open source or not, when you say something is production-quality it
should have been thoroughly tested.

[P.S. I'm not trying to pick on RedHat in particular; it's just the
 distro I know best other than Debian]

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/