Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

> 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.