I'd stick with Debian

I'd stick with Debian

Posted Jun 7, 2005 11:46 UTC (Tue) by philips (guest, #937)
In reply to: I'd stick with Debian by micampe
Parent article: Yellow Dog Linux sticks with PowerPC

Well, seems readers never really compared YellowDog with other distros. And never tried Apple's hardware.

Beaty (or bogosity) of Apple's hardware in its limited number of configurations. Fedora, Debian, Ununtu all have the inherited hardware configuration mess from ix86. Apple's hardware do not - I repeat do not - need all those mess.

You can easily read model number from OpenFirmware and tell precisely what kind of hardware you have.

YellowDog - just as Mac OS itself - does not need any configuration. I repeat again: does not need any configuration. Because it is static. I think only top of the line PowerMacs do have additional PCI/PCI-X slots and video card is replaceable too. But again: Apple sells only nVidia & ATI. But as much variety goes - that's it.

Compare to e.g. Dell. My company have had shipment of 6 Dells: 3 different hard drives models were found inside (one model had repeatedly failed, so complete shipment was inspected - that's why I know details), two different kinds of motherboards, 3 different kind of Pentium IV fans. The same shipment! My colleage Dell is louder than my loudspeakers - mine is completely quiet. Go figure.

Gosh, Apple is so nicely predictable. Thou slow. But it has this primitive beauty: it just works.

Fedora's support for PPC is something new - I haven't heard about it before. I know that later RHLs (8 & 9) dropped PPC support. Didn't tried Ubuntu. Debian as of 2.2/3.0 shipped outdated XFree which had huge problems recognizing my video card - I have had problems even with frame buffer initialization. Going to try 3.1 soon ;-)))

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