What Distro to use

[Blake Barnett]

There are many differences between RedHat and Debian, BSDness or SysVness
aside, the most noticeable are the package management and installation.
Redhat has added all sorts of "Usability Features" and modifications to the
standards found in most linux distros or unix bundles.

The downfall is when you begin to rely on distribution-specific tools and
feel lost when you switch to something new.  That's why the "unix-way" is
also the safest.  Learn to use the core unix tools and you can move easily
from one linux to another linux/*nix/bsd.

I must say I completely agree with you on package management.  RPM is the
reason I moved from slackware, ports are the reason I moved from Redhat to
openBSD/freeBSD, and apt is the reason I've gone to Debian.  There are all
sorts of other drawbacks and advantages to each distribution.  Some may not
be as apparent as others.  It's during those 3am troubleshooting sessions
that you find them.

For a server, RedHat has a lot of advantages, most commercial packages are
ported to RedHat first and need major tweaking to get running on other
distros.  RedHat has a lot of "canned" solutions already available (not
always the best thing.)  And if you want support, more people use RedHat in
production environments than any other distro AFAIK.

For someone who knows what they need, how to do it, and is security-aware.
Go with Debian.

Blake Barnett
Sr. Unix Administrator
DevelopOnline.com Corporation
(480) 377-6816

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Buettner [mailto:kev@primenet.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 3:46 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: What Distro to use


On Nov 3,  4:28am, Bill Warner wrote:

> Working for a company where we have a unix support staff of 10 people.  8
> of witch are Debian users/admins and none of witch are Redhat fans or
really
> much for users.  Now because of this missconception that you can just call
> Redhat and they will give you a magic answer I have to re-learn Redhat
> and curse it at every bump that could have been avoided and was when we
> first brought everything up on Debian.

Bill,

It sounds to me like you're just upset about having had something
rammed down your throats by your management.

Could you give us a concrete example of something that was difficult
in Red Hat, but easy with Debian?

I am quite frankly amazed that you feel as strongly as you do about
which distribution you're using.  AFAICT, the only things that
significantly distinguish the distributions are ease of installation
(or lack thereof) and package management.  FWIW, the package
management issue is why I switched to Red Hat (from Slackware) many
years ago.

Kevin

P.S. You should look at the bright side; you're still using Linux,
you have the source code to everything, and it's not that hard to
fix the things that you don't like.

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