[CLUE-Tech] Fedora vs Debain

[Angelo Bertolli]

> Now hold on a sec.. I'm not trying to fan the flames of a distro war,
> but you need to realize that there is more to Debian than just Woody and
> Sarge.  There are 3 branches of Debian, woody/stable, sarge/testing,
> sid/unstable.  If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to
> compare Sid with Fedora.  When you do that, you'll find that Sid has all
> the same packages ( and more ) than Fedora and all of them are every bit
> as current.

Well I never tried Sid simply because I was pretty sure I'd have even more
problems with that.  I assumed that because Sarge locks up on me in
X-Windows from time to time, Sid would be worse.  Maybe this is comparable
to the Fedora testing release, but I haven't even gone there.  I'm still
talking about Fedora FC1, and yes it only had kernel 2.4.  But I'm going
to bet you Fedora will have a decently stable release with a 2.6 kernel
before anyone else does ;)

But that's not the point really anyway.  I bet even Woody allows an
upgrade to kernel 2.6.  The point is... I was counting on debian and the
'discover' program to be able to detect my hardware well enough so that
it didn't lock up on me.

> Also, Debian brings another main value that I appreciate: elegant
> package management.  I'm not talking about apt-get, which you can get
> for RPM-based distros now.  I mean 'dpkg'.  The way that Debian manages
> its packages is head and shoulders above anything else I've seen.  The
> smart resolution of dependency conflicts, to a nice curses-based
> prompting system to ask you some basic configuration questions as you
> install packages, has made my life much easier.

I really haven't had any major problems with rpm.  I think if you know to
modify files in /etc then you shouldn't have a problem.  The reason I
wanted to use Debian was because of apt and discover.

> The reason the 'released' versions lag behind the bleeding edge stuff
> like Sid ( and Fedora for that matter ) is because they are thoroughly
> tested and 'stabilized'.  You can't have 'beta' or 'alpha' quality
> packages and still expect everything to run like a clock.  When you run
> Debian stable for a few years, you will appreciate the term 'it just
> works'.  Tinkering is great if you only have one or two servers to run,
> but if you've got a rack full of linux boxes, keeping up with the latest
> and greatest becomes a race that you just can't win.

Wouldn't you agree that Fedora is more comparable to the testing distro
than the unstable distro of Debian, stability-wise.  At least for me,
Fedora has been perfectly stable, while Sarge has not been.  I do approach
these comparisons from a stability standpoint.  It makes no sense to
compare by "version number" or by "what's the latest thing they have out."
If I come out with a version of Linux which is so unstable it's
practically unusable, I can probably include every newest piece of
software ever imagined... does that make it the "most advanced?"

> When Sarge is promoted to stable, I will most certainly upgrade to it
> and fully expect to enjoy another 3 years of easy to admin boxes.

If Sarge becomes stable, and it still has problems with my machine, then I
guess I won't blame Debian... I'll know it was a compatibility issue.  So
maybe this is all about a quirky situation with me, and my experience is
skewed.

Angelo