Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 25th Oct 2003 05:13 UTC, submitted by Charles Krohn
Today, Ian Murdock described his recent work on APT to the Debian community. This announcement has far-ranging implications for the future of Fedora and Debian projects. Ars Technica has the details.
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Cheapskate, I don't dual boot and I don't run Windows. I'm using FreeBSD at the moment, but I've also used Linux since the mid-1990's: Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandrake, Arch...the lot. Of them, Slackware is my favorite; when I use it, I prefer to do a minimal install and then compile what I want from source.
My issue is not with the Debian install. It's with Woody's lack of contemporary applications and with Woody's use of an old and outdated version of XFree86. Debian has a lot to offer, but I'm not prepared to step back to 1997 to get it.
Woody is lauded for stability, but the trade off is that you're saddled with old code and, frankly, an ugly desktop. If you want to change it, you need to look at backports, etd., because even the unstable branch isn't really current. Once you start looking at backports, or installing from source, you've lost the two chief benefits of Debian: Woody's stability and the use of apt.
Other distributions seem to be running quite reliably without sacrificing quality and contemporary applications.
It isn't unusual for some folks to downplay the display quality issue, casting it as "eye candy", but that's just dead wrong. People want quality. Anyone's first impression of an computer system is what they see on the screen. Expectatons will be lower if the display fails to impress.
Look at it this way: Put an XP, OS X, and Woody machine in front of someone. Load Yahoo in IE on XP, on Safari in OS X, and Netscape on Woody. Ask them which display is the least pleasing.