[Coco] Re: [Color Computer] Anyone following the latest Microsoft and Linux debacles?

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 11:45, Kevin Diggs wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 	Anyone know anything about debian?
> 
> 					kevin

It's the premier "community supported" distribution... they are
absolutely committed to the principles of Free Software, and the distro
is completely produced by volunteers.

It is a great stand-alone distro, which is how I use it. It is also the
basis of

Knoppix
Morphix
Ubuntu
Linspire
Xandros

among others: http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros

There are two main criticisms I hear about Debian:

A. It's hard to install
B. Their stable distribution is old

For A., it can be tough. The installer is a simple command line driven
installer. There is a new installer for the next version. Keep in mind
that Debian has to run on a lot more architectures (X86, PowerPC, MIPS,
680x0, ARM, etc.) than most distros, so they keep the installer simple.
The other thing is that once you install Debian, you don't reinstall it.
It is designed to always be upgradeable to the next revision.

To B: the stable distribution (currently, Woody) is older, and only gets
security bugfixes. But it really is stable. I use it to run my
webserver. But for the desktop I use Debian Unstable (Sid) so I always
run the latest and greatest of everything. I've found that apps in
unstable rarely break, but it has happened here and there, with a fix
usually within a week. You can always revert a prior release to resolve
issues.


-- John.