On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 09:33:21AM -0600, Robert L. Harris wrote: | | I'm looking for a study/comparison of RedHat vs Debian. We have a | number of boxes, some production, which run everything from RedHat | 6.0 and newer. I'd like to look at converting to Debian stable but | need to justify my case before I can even formally suggest it. I've | started listing my own reasons and issues but need more. Any good | suggestions or comparisions already done?
Debian stable is quite old. I used to run RH (started with 5.2 but it didn't like my video card, then used 6.1 and 7.0 with lots of manual upgrades inbetween). I don't remember which version of GNOME they ship with, but potato has only 1.0.55. There are a lot of other things that have been updated since the release of stable. However, stable is really stable and a good platform. When the next stable is released (woody) then you can easily upgrade every package you have using 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. If you have a need for newer software than is in stable, you could run testing. I don't know if it is generally recommended for production use, but I use it on my workstation at home. It has been really stable for me -- I haven't had any problems with it. I much prefer Debian's package management and development philosophy to RedHat's. (They also don't use broken compilers and libc's on supposedly stable releases) While Debian stable is rather outdated, the people who want the latest stuff have it by using sid instead. For the most part RH doesn't provide new packages until the next release is labeled "stable". Debian also provides security updates to stable (install via 'apt-get') and has many more packages than RH. There were some apps that I wanted, but couldn't get to compile on my RH system. When I installed potato I found that they were already included! HTH, -D
