The Debian Flamewar Strikes Back! (was: ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora)

Star nhstar at gmail.com
Tue Feb 27 08:50:56 EST 2007


>   At this point, the subject line has become something of an in-joke,
> although I will concede I may be the only one "in" on it.
>

Oh no!  Actually, I should have known better than to be sipping coffee while
opening this thread...  Ah well, that's why there's a stack of keyboards
over there...

And speaking as someone who has sought you out at times just to start the
"You know why Debian is better..?" conversations, there is something to be
said in the mental flexing that happens with any such conversation.

Debian's my choice because it's where my comfort zone is.  I have a fairly
good understanding of where it's putting "stuff" and where to look when I
change one-too-many lines in a config file.  That all started when i got
really p!$$3d off with a RH7 install and a bout of "Dependency Hell" in the
days before a stable dependency manager (that I was aware of) in RH.  I took
the time to work through all of the problems that a Potato install gave me,
'cause $DIETYs knew that it couldn't be as bad as where I was coming from!
Or so I told myself to prove to me why I was right, and it wasn't really a
fruitless exercise :-D

Once I hit that comfort-zone, and fell in love with the (at that time)
largest available repositories, I was ready to go.  Didn't touch RH again
until 9, and by that time, I'd already converted and been confirmed as a
Debian Zealot.  My attempts to change and view other distros (5 months with
Suse, 4+ months with various Fedoras on work machines, 13.5 minutes with
Ubuntu Hoary [What do you mean now Firefox 1.5?!], a number of "let's see"
with Mandr[ake|iva]), it came back to where I knew what was going on.  Yes,
on FCx and RHx, changing the interface is as easy as going to
/etc/sysconfig/networking/ifcfg.ethx (or some such), but my fingers are
already hardwired for "vi /etc/network/interfaces" when I want to change
'em.  When my nVidia xserver doesn't fire up after a kernel upgrade, I
already know (and accept) that it's back at the console for a brief rounder
with Module-Assistant...  The times recently when I test drove the other
distros was more of a curiosity adventure and I knew that I could always run
back under the covers when I didn't wanna figure it out any more.

None of these are perfect, I just happened to chose the imperfect one that I
like best.  I still think that part of the reason that FOSS in general game
so far so fast is because of the typical user-base's tendency to stretch the
boundaries of it's original function.  Hence all of the breakage, fixage,
and rapid bug-patch-releasage (hey I was on a theme).

As to the proprietary stuff: There are pay-for distros that work just fine
with MP3 and DVD codecs, and their price is downright reasonable...
Mandriva, Suse, and RH Workstation have been including them in their
packages for... how long?

Next on the adgenda...  Gnome is so much better than KDE because...

~ Star
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