Time to move from Red Hat to Debian? [LWN.net]

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 15:33 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

> I thought about trying Mandrake. But no way:
> - I cannot install it on my router/printserver (486) - no problem with Debian.

Small computers are the future of the world :) Installing Mandrake on a 486 is very hard
indeed. Realistically speaking though, Linux has become too bulky for a 486. Not that it's
not possible.

> - Many packages that are important to me are not available for
> Mandrake. Yes, there are 3rd party RPMs, but if I have problems,
> I cannot report them to Mandrake, because it's 3rd party. No
> problem with Debian, because everything's there.

No you report them to the Mandrake community. Mandrake (just like Debian) is
community oriented. You cannot report it to the *company* Mandrake, but there is no
company called Debian either.

While this comment does not make sense from the eyes of the Debian user, for a Red
Hat user, your arguments make sense and advise both against Mandrake and Debian.

>- I was not able to find Mandrake for the arm or for the alpha
> platform. Mandrake seems not to care about non-i586 platforms.
> No problem with Debian.

Still on the moon, I see. Come back to earth and visit:

ftp://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/linux/Mandrake-devel/cooker

It's installed on my Alpha!

> The very good integration of all packages, the strict packaging
> policy,

This is indeed wel done on Debian.

> the freedom of choosing different hardware

??? Sorry, no offense, but Debian is the distribition that is most behind on the hardware
front.

> , the freedom of
> using a lot of packages, that are really part of the distribution,

> and tools like debconf all give good reasons to choose Debian.

Primitive...

> It's not only apt-get!

Good, that was the point. Actually, I'm not so much a Mandrake user, I install SuSE on
most systems. I also maintain a Debian system. And my little Alpha runs Mandrake.

But for Red Hat users, Mandrake looks a good possibility to me.

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 16:02 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

> ??? Sorry, no offense, but Debian is the distribition that is most
behind on the hardware front.

Eh? Most distributions, Red Hat included, are single-architecture (x86).
Debian runs on at least half a dozen architectures.... sparc, PPC, ARM,
alpha, m86k (ugh)....

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 16:23 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

A couple more:

ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 17:04 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

Try to get 3d hardware acceleration out of a Radeon 8500 on Debian stable. The card is
on the market for years now. I know someone who tried it very hard and went as far as
manually compiling XFree86 4.3 and in the end switched to SuSE to make it work, out of
the box without any configuration effort at all. That is what I meant and it's not just video
cards. Another big issue is that to be able to anything serious with hardware at all you
have to replace the default 2.2 kernel with a 2.4 one. This is something no other
distribution requires it's users do to.

Again, no offense. Debian has strong points, but these are critical issues Debian needs
to solve.

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 20:04 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I'm using a separate repository to get XFree86 4.3. There are several independent Debian repositories on http://apt-get.org/

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 7, 2003 15:34 UTC (Fri) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link]

Debian stable is not meant for the desktop. It's for servers.
you want latest packages, use other backported sources or use testing/unstable.

I run unstable on my desktops/laptops. No problem.

Please do your homework

Posted Nov 6, 2003 16:27 UTC (Thu) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

- I cannot install it on my router/printserver (486) - no problem with Debian.

If your 486 has a maths co-processor, you can install Mandrake on it. If it doesn't, you're wasting your time on a system like that. The time you spend installing anything on it is likely more than you would pay for a decent i586 box.

- Many packages that are important to me are not available for Mandrake. Yes, there are 3rd party RPMs, but if I have problems, I cannot report them to Mandrake, because it's 3rd party. No problem with Debian, because everything's there.

You make it sound like contrib is placed all over the internet like Debian backports are. This is not the case. There are very few packages available on the net that are not in contrib (and thus supported by the community).

Name the packages you need, I am sure they will be in main or contrib. If it's in main or contrib, and there's a problem with it, file a bug.

- I was not able to find Mandrake for the arm or for the alpha platform. Mandrake seems not to care about non-i586 platforms. No problem with Debian.

Mandrake cooker is available for i586, sparc, alpha, ppc and amd64, in addition to the supported releases for ia64, ppc, amd64 and i586 that have been made in the past.

The very good integration of all packages, the strict packaging policy, the freedom of choosing different hardware, the freedom of using a lot of packages, that are really part of the distribution, and tools like debconf all give good reasons to choose Debian. It's not only apt-get!

Please do your homework.

Mandrake packages are pretty decent, and a lot of work is being done on improving them. At present, most of the packages in the distritbution rebuild automatically (in other words all Buildrequires are correct and requirements between the buildrequires are correct) on all platforms that are running cooker.

Packaging policies are similar to Debian (library naming etc), and urpmi now competes with apt-get.

The only thing we don't have is Debconf, but usually configs have sane out-the-box configurations and are well documented. Plus, there is something in the works that will be better than Debconf if it works out as planned.

Please, before you make statements like the ones you did, at least do some research. http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/wiki is a good place to start.

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 10, 2003 12:11 UTC (Mon) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

One of the most funny things is that whenever the discussion arrives the Debian advocates can only think of apt-get as the reason to switch.

Er.... This is a very clear example of selective reading on your part. Indeed, read the very article to which your comment is attached.

Freedom and stability were my two primary reasons for preferring Debian. Freedom in the sense that Debian is dediated to the ideal, and in the sense that I know there is no danger of having to pay in order to be able to use that apt-get convenience. Red Hat may do apt-get, but I don't trust that forever it will be easy to do it without paying for a subscription.

Once Red Hat moved away from having x.2 releases, I knew I couldn't trust it to be stable enough for what I wanted. Debian also has a lot of inertia. Unlike Mandrake, which has had a big question mark in the past as to whether it would continue to exist, Debian has always been community supported, so there is no worry of "what might happen" if the company behinds it goes under or changes it's distribution policies. This is all part of the "stability" argument-- not just the long release cycle and true stability of Debian stable, but the stability of their development and support model. Yeah, maybe not as great support as you might get somewhere else, but support that you can believe will continue in something similar to what it is now, so you'll know what to expect.

-Rob