>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".)
Here's mine: I found out about Red hat 5.1 just surfing through the web one day on my mighty Win 95 box. I had recently purcha$ed System Commander because I wanted to try OS/2 and any other OS that ran on a PC because I was getting fed up with windows. I was very excited when I pulled the Red Hat CD's out of the box and set up system commander to use it. I got very frustrated trying to make everything work, read to many reviews saying Linux wasn't ready for mainstream, and scraped it. When 5.2 came out I tried it again. Same story, things worked easier and I was able to get more things functional. I used 5.2 for about 6 months and was getting to the point that I didn't want to use Windows anymore. I wanted to take advantage of Linux as a server so I setup an old machine with the just out RH 6.1. I set up a network with a RH server, desktop, and one winbox. The reason I chose 6.1 was they had advertised a new "easy" way to keep rpm's up to date. I had heard about Debian but had veered away because everyone said it was difficult to use. Well, I tried using their rpm update tool and it crashed; HARD. It locked up my machine everytime I tried to use it! After a couple of weeks of reading everything I could on how to fix it I finally gave up. That was it, I had reached the same frustration point that I had when I used windows. That phrase I used to hear from tech support or some other person trying to help me seemed to be reappearing everywhere I looked: "If you purcha$e the updated version that problem will be fixed" or "You just need to upgrade to the latest rpm and it'll work" The problem was I could never find the "latest" rpm and even when I did, the damn thing never installed because I couldn't find the "latest" dependicies. Arrrrrrggggggghhhh!!!! Enter Debian. (I could swear I hear "Bad to the bone" playing in the background) In one weekend I had converted both server and network to Debian with no loss of any previous functionality. I learned more about Linux in one month using Debian than I could have in a year with another distribution. Since that fateful day approximately 12 months ago I have installed Samba, got a DNS caching nameserver up, rsynced and created a local mirror on my server so I only have to download once to update both machines, exported that mirror NFS to my desktop, created a mail server to store my mail centrally. Sounds like I know what I'm doing doesn't it? Wrong. I have absolutely no formal computer education. None, nada, zip. Debian isn't the toughest distribution to use, It is a teaching distribution. Once you learn how they document, learn how to access the resources on www.debian.org, get on debian-user, you just can't lose. Top 10 reasons to use Debian 10. The package manager is magic. 9. You don't have to type /mnt before actually entering the CD-ROM directory. 8. The package manager is magic. 7. If packages don't install in a usable configuration, it's called a bug. 6. The package manager is magic. 5. Try man debian_rocks for reason #6 4. The package manager is magic, for real, I mean it. 3. You get to choose if you want to run unstable apps. 2. See #4 1. Did I mention the package manager was magic? Jesse
