ยป Steve R. Hastings said this and I say that:
> I am interested in why people prefer Debian to other Linux
> distributions. Please explain the top few reasons why you chose Debian
> rather than something else.
>
> Perhaps we can collect the responses together, edit them, and put the
> result up on the debian.org web page. I have looked and looked, both on
> the Web and in the book store, and I have found few explanations of why
> people prefer a particular distribution. (There is lots of "why you
> should use Linux" but not much of "why I use Debian rather than
> something else".)
Okay, then.
Here is how it happened to me.
I started using Linux just about 1 1/2 year ago, I was
interested because, amongst a lot of Windoze NT machines in the
computing room at the Physics Institute (where I study), I saw some
displays with a "strange" screen (it was xdm) I had never seen
before. A friend of mine, who was used to that system, told me it was
another OS called Linux, that it was free (he told he that meant I
would not pay anything to use it, and any copy would be perfectly
legal). I was used to the Windoze world, and so I didn't believe
it. And I believed it even less when he told me it would not give me
those blue screens...
Anyway, I decided to give it a try (oh, the old times when I
thought computers could not be fun...). At first, it impressed me by
the visual style of the thing, I just loved all those configurations I
could set for it (I fell in love with Afterstep :-P). I didn't know
the distros existed yet.
The system where I got my first account was a Debian Slink,
and thanks to its administrator it was well-configured, and that gave
me a good first impression. And I got really impressed when, after 6
months, it had never let me down. In the previous 6 months, using NT,
the system failed me about 5 times a week...
Some time later, I began using other distributions and
installing Linux on some machines. The first thing I tried was
Conectiva Linux, a brazilian "distribution", that in fact was just
copied from (ack!) Red Hat (don't even try that thing, unless you want
to have some problem). Then I tried Mandrake, Red Hat (which I just
HATED), Corel, Caldera... anything impressed me like Debian.
Anyway, if you want to know why I use (and STRONGLY recommend)
Debian, here it goes:
1) If Linux is already a thousand times more stable than
"that" OS, Debian is even more stable than any of them;
2) Even if the affirmation that Debian MAY not have up-to-date
packages, the dpkg/apt-get stuff is the best package managing system
ever, and that makes easy to make a ultra-stable server and a
development desktop-box;
3) I feel comfortable using it - its structure is the one that
works with me (I can navigate without any problem in the system)
4) It follows strictly the GNU philosophy: anything is more
FREE than Debian.
Sorry if my english is not the best in the world.
Also, these are only my opinions.
--
francisco m. neto
(a.k.a ikari himura keiichi)
Linux User #192809
ICQ #78493934
http://socrates.if.usp.br/~einstein
"Toke au kokoro ga, watashi o kowasu"
-- Ayanami Rei
