Red Hat Linux 9.0 announced

Red Hat Linux 9.0 announced

Recently, I've been seriously considering a switch to Debian, because of the apparent ease of upgrades. I'd love to be able to test a new major version, then deploy it remotely without touching the machines. My main concern is with security updates. Red Hat does a terrific job with security patches, in general. To keep as up-to-date as I need to be, I'd need to Debian-unstable, but I'm worried about the speed with which security updates are released for the unstable tree. Does anyone have any advice about this?

The Debian install is not as simple as the RedHat install. You're likely to spend a bit more time futzing around with getting specific hardware working, although if you're a long time Linux user that's not all that big a deal. (It's all still fully supported-- it's just that the RedHat installer does a very good job of automatically recognizing everything, whereas I've found that the Debian installer still leaves you needing to tell it the name of your video card, and perhaps configuring modules to load the right module for your sound card.) It's not a huge step back, but that is one drawback.

Once you have it going, though, it's very nice. I switched from RedHat to Debian after trying RedHat 8 and being horrified to figure out that RPM had a bug... I couldn't install the updates without RPM dying partway through. With Debian, apt-get hasn't given me trouble. I run several machines on stable, and one on testing, and all have been fine.

I don't know that Debian will maintain support for an "old" stable version much longer than RedHat does. I think that after a new stable version comes out for Debian, you have to worry about security updates drying up in a matter of half a year or (at most) a year. On the other hand, stable Debian releases come out very infrequently, so you won't need to perform the major upgrade cycle nearly as often. And, unlike RedHat x.0-- which wise people avoid, waiting for x.2-- by the time a Debian stable release comes out it really is stable, and you can be confident upgrading to it.

Making that kind of switch won't be all win, but for what you're doing, you may find it better.

The downside of the slow pace of major Debian releases is that after a while, Debian stable doesn't support any recent hardware.... If it's 1.5-2 years between major stable releases, then by the time the last release is long in the tooth, any recent video cards won't be supported by the version of X in the last stable release, etc. There are ways around this by pulling software from Debian testing, but of course if you're running a whole bunch of systems its easier if you don't have to do too much individual futzing around, and can keep everything just running on the stable release. Unless you buy machines all the time, though, this may not be that serious of a worry.

-Rob