Re: [ProgSoc] linux type differences

["Dennis L. Clark" <dbugger@nospam.vnet.net>]

On Sat, Jun 20 1998, Roland Turner wrote:
| 
| Unless you are planning to do seriously wierd stuff (develop software
| for example :-)), file paths are almost irrelevant, as long as your
| distribution has packages available for what you wish to do. On this
| count, Debian wins hands down, with around 1860 packages ready to deploy
| themselves to your hard upon request. The only software installed on my
| notebook that isn't in Deabain packages is Gnome. Sadly, Debian's
| package selection tool is, umm, ugly.

If you're interested, Jim Pick has been working on packaging GNOME for
Debian over the past 2 months. It's still work-in-progress (tho as GNOME
itself is work-in-progress, that shouldn't deter you) but you can find
at <http://www.jimpick.com/>.

Debian has been cringing over its package selection tool for a while
now, but thankfully progress has been showing with the development of
its next-generation tool, uncontroversially called APT (in stark
contrast to its previous name :) It won't be available in Debian 2.0,
but is planned to be ready by Debian 2.1.

Speaking of which, Debian 2.0 has just gone into post-deep-freeze
RealUser(tm) beta testing after developers have spent a year (an
eternity in the software world) on development, and about 4 months on
code-freeze testing. Why so long, you ask? Perhaps this is best answered
by someone who has upgraded a RedHat system from 4.2 to 5.0 ;)

| Opinion: More choice is better than less, although both offer more
| choice in their own way, Debian's approach allows me to be a user when I
| am installing software that I don't wish to be an expert on (shells,
| window managers, web browsers, web servers, etc.) so I can focus on
| developing stuff that I do want to be an expert on.

I think just about all the Linux distributions aim for that approach
these days... except perhaps Slackware ;)

Commercial Linux distributions are good for users who are prepared to
pay a bit more for the privilege of using commercialware productivity
tools such as StarOffice suite or Motif. They are also good if you
prefer to pay for a technical phone support contract than to scan
web sites, newsgroups, and mailing lists for fixes to problems.

The "hot" commercial Linux distributions of the month seem to include
RedHat, Caldera, and S.u.S.E. Be warned tho that this list seems to
change on an almost monthly basis.

For me, I find that Debian has been good at innovating approaches,
rather than just packages. Things like dwww, menu, alien, update-inetd
and update-rc.d, when integrated with the rest of the packages in the
system, make a big improvement in the system's maintainability... when
done right. Debian developers have been able to try such things out in
developer distributions, get feedback from other developers and
bleeding-edge users, and refine their concept before stable release.
There is often a small learning step involved, but the new functionality
is almost always worth it, as it leaves the user with _LESS_ to do, not
more.

Finally, whichever distribution you pick won't matter that much as long
as its current, since the strongest development in Linux is, as it
always was and always will be, in the open-source software world. This
means that most good ideas used by one distribution can (and will) be
made available on others.

Cheers,

-- 
       Dennis Clark       dbugger@nospam.debian.org       PGP/MIME spoken here
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today's entry from the Jargon File:

       die /v./  Syn. {crash}.  Unlike {crash}, which is used
          primarily of hardware, this verb is used of both hardware and
          software.  See also {go flatline}, {casters-up mode}.

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