This guest editorial by Linux consultant Binh Nguyen is an exercise in “tough love.” Nguyen points out key design attributes of Debian that make it one of the strongest and most versatile Linux offerings available. At the same time, he notes several important areas where Debian falls flat. Yet, with a few simple improvements and a more welcoming attitude to new users, Nguyen argues, Debian could turn into the most popular Linux distro around. Elsewhere, Debian Women: Geek feminists in action.
A constructive critique of Debian Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I believe author haven’t tried sarge installer – hardware autodetection is available and works like charm.
As for X configuration – criticism is in place here, for me it looks like something “for now”, imo X should not require any configuration to run.
Whenever applications brings dbconf to be used on dpkg-reconfigure depends on app it self.
I have done lots of sarge (new debian) installer testing – and I’m pleased, not only it works fine, it’s internal structure is beautiful and very expandable.
The number of packages that are included as part of a version of Debian are quite astonishing (~8700 at last count)
Sarge has over 16,000 packages now.
yup. the new installer is slick, makes me almost want to wipe Slackware off my main box and use Debian in its place, (almost)
This you call “constructive” ? I call lama, unprofessional, amateur, novice, and anything else but contructive.
“For this reason, I must insist upon the inclusion of such “extensions” [i.e. more multimedia, commercial i.e. more non-free i.e. more non-debian-policy] into the Debian and other Linux distributions. Not doing so would deprive many users the ability of being able to maximize the capabilites of their systems.”
This is crap. It is talking to fill the page, nothing more. It’s something that every lame (l)user would come up with when asked to talk about the matter. It’s not commercial or dubiously-GPL software that would make a distro better. As debian-guys all know (but still being the subject of constant debate, which IMO is a good thing (!)) that including not completely cristal clear software could cause real troubles in the long run.
As to what makes a great distro even better, is the really simple and easy install, extension, package management, updating, administration possibilities. And not the default inclusion of a media player or anything else whose install is just a bit more complicated than finding a can of beer in my fridge – which isn’t that hard
I couldn’t exactly decipher his complaint about multimedia stuff (if it even was one, I’m not sure). But that’s the only thing you need to use an external repository for (for fear of legal issues). The one I use is:
ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat
Debian is not meant for the casual user or first-timers. Well, except for my sister who I set everything up for. However, look at distros like Xandros which are hailed as being the easiest in the world. They are based on Debian. They just provide the “end-user” touches that they need. But at the heart is the Debian beast.
As for elitism, I’ve been in #debian a few times and never saw any big problems. Unfortunately, assholes aren’t limited to just what Linux distribution they run–they’re everywhere in the world.
This was just REALLY well written. Most articles like this simply aren’t well done and focus on crap. This article got to the meat of the issues. Things like RTFM are problems with the “elite”-er linux distributions (frankly, I’ve always found searching the bug-tracker usually helped more than the documentation). Configuration tools aren’t there as much, but Gnome seems to be heading in that direction anyway which reduces the need for distro-specific tools. I disagree that Debian’s advantage in apt/dpkg has been nullified by rpm, yum, up2date and apt4rpm. None of those work nearly as well. I haven’t used portage to comment on it.
One of the things he didn’t touch on was server vs. desktop use. Yeah, Debian can be used for either, but for Debian Stable (vs. testing and unstable) has got to be considered mostly for servers right now. Such an amazingly stable set of applications that are so well tested together is really what people want for a production server. A personal desktop doesn’t need such stability and can deal with more recent updates. I think this is why I like Ubuntu so much. It is Debian, but focused on the desktop. The big thing about Ubuntu is that it doesn’t try to be more than Debian – something that no project that doesn’t have the numbers of Debian could possibly do (for my money, no distro can out do Debian). Rather it tries to be Debian for the desktop. It keeps things standard (unlike things like Xandros and Linspire and Mepis) and doesn’t concentrate on the flash over the substance as many take-off distros do trying to woo customers. They use the same exceedingly well tested Debian Installer. Why? Because it is good software that works perfectly and while it might not be the flashiest, it is great. They work on integrating Gnome configuration tools rather than building their own stiff. Things like that.
All in all the article was great. One usually finds articles about stuff like this saying things like “Debian is so old” not realizing that by not changing the stable branch constantly, they are offering rock solid stability that other distributions stable branches can’t come close to (which is really important for many uses). It goes to what is important in the Debian sphere. Kudos.
There’s a GUI frontend for DebConf, called gkdebconf http://packages.debian.org/testing/admin/gkdebconf
Anybody read the second article? With regards to Debian removing “sexist language” from the documentation:
a number of Debian developers, particularly ones who speak English as a second language, questioned the need for the change and whether the replacement of “he” with “they” for the indefinite personal pronoun was grammatically correct.
That is very definitely not grammatically correct. “He” is a singular pronoun, “they” is a plural pronoun. So saying “when the user wants to install a package, they should open up Synaptic” is just plain wrong. It’s also pointless. In English, “he” can either be masculine or gender neutral, just as “man” can either refer to males or hu*man*s in general. If the gender of the user is not known, it is proper to use “he” in the gender neutral sense.
Rejection of any criticism is characteristic of a cult. Some of the article’s points were on target.
Debian — the distribution, not the community — can be faulted for lacking both a coherent and centralized tool to do system maintenance as well avoiding any attempt to inform a new Debian users about the tools that are available. This applies to experienced Linux users, not just complete newbies. To cut to the chase, why should I need to wander around the Debian site looking for documentation that explains its init system when what I want to do is just stop something like Postfix from running? Why not make doing this — or at least learning how to do it — as quick and as painless as possible? Even the most experienced and skillful among us have better things to do than trying to figure out the “Debian way” to do common, everyday, things.
Consider the tasks that typically need to be performed following the installation of a new desktop: adding and configuring a printer; configuring X to work with the video card, possibly installing a driver; sound configuration; turning off unwanted services or adding needed services; firewall configuration, etc.
Debian offers tools to do each of those, in the typical Debian-way. But, unfortunately, they aren’t obvious. No single front-end is available to allow simple access to them all. (If there is, then I’m wrong, but I’ve never found it when I’ve used Debian.)
A more specific example: If you use the new Sarge installer select “Desktop Environment”, and attempt to add a new printer immediately after the install completes, you’ll learn that CUPS and an unknown (and unspecified) number of related packages are not installed. I won’t attempt to ponder why a “Desktop” install fails to install common printing prerequisites, but wouldn’t it make sense to assume a new user would, in fact, want to install a printer and make that as easy as possible? Currently, Debian required you to know how to use apt, what CUPS is, and how to select the appropriate dependencies for your own machine.
Distributions based on Debian deal with this by making these common tasks as easy and as foolproof as possible. That’s a lesson worth learning.
Debian has a module for non-free software, but unfortunately most of the time the so called commercial software’s licence won’t allow to include it there.
Like for example Nvidia’s drivers, etc.
The packagers have to work around this by using some kind of installer package that then downloads the software.
I wouldn’t call that refusal of inclusion on behalf of the Debian packagers.
Like for example Nvidia’s drivers, etc.
The packagers have to work around this by using some kind of installer package that then downloads the software.
This isn’t true, nvidia-glx and nvidia kernel modules are provided in non-free.
It more or less requires a working way to send smtp mail but doesn’t really help with setting that up, especially for leaf node systems (like normal home users, desktop users, ISP customers). Default is exim with a pretty difficult setup procedure (I found it hard when I first started using Debian years ago, and I don’t think it’s changed much). I’m currently trying to get masqmail configured.
I use and love Debian and would love to see it improve in this and other areas.
Strikes me as a good, thoughtful, well-written article. I’ve run with Debian twice, each time for a number of months. But each time, I’ve ended by wiping it and going back to SuSE. Why? Because SuSE (and other mainstream distros, I expect) offers a hundred and one small touches around the desktop that individually don’t mean much but which collectively add up to something that’s a whole lot easier and more satisfying to use, right down to really nice anti-aliasing on fonts because the basic config files have been tweaked. Debian’s insistence on plain vanilla – leaving the user to tweak up their own configuration – can be phenomenally expensive of a user’s time, especially for a new user. That, and the article’s well-made points about the sometimes less than helpful mailing lists and the fact that nearly everyone is now in on an apt or apt-like online package management system, so Debian no longer has much of an advantage in this regard.
Ok, bad example, but I think they changed the licence to allow this, it didn’t initially.
Sun’s JRE might be a better example, I think it is still not allowed to include it in distributions.
“He” is a singular pronoun, “they” is a plural pronoun.
And “you” is also a singular pronoun. Natural languages aren’t always perfectly logical. The singular “they” has existed in English for a very long time. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/16/143616/593
Indeed, the way one chooses packages during installation could do with plenty of improvements.
Even very seasoned Debian users have confessed that they find aptitude ncurses interface daunting.
As to taskel it is too basic to say the least.
couldn’t exactly decipher his complaint about multimedia stuff (if it even was one, I’m not sure). But that’s the only thing you need to use an external repository for (for fear of legal issues). The one I use is
Please note that its due to patents. The URL you provide is based in France, where these patents do not apply. The author doesn’t seem to understand that:
I do believe that multimedia support should be included as part of any operating system. After all, the computer has become a centerpiece in home entertainment. It is now being used not only for work, but also for leisure.
Debian is an international project and the software packaged by Debian is able to run worldwide, on various platforms. That has advantages and disadvantages; in this case, we see how the US patent system is a burden for non-US based people. IIRC, neither does RedHat include these programs.
Rayiner, why wouldn’t ‘he or she’ make sense instead of merely ‘he’. I’d easily agree with man/human depending on context, but ‘he’ assumes the person is a male while the documentation cannot assume such because the documentation is not aware the reader is a male or female. Therefore, it should be as neutral as possible, and ‘he or she’ is more neutral than ‘he’.
Consider the tasks that typically need to be performed following the installation of a new desktop: adding and configuring a printer; configuring X to work with the video card, possibly installing a driver; sound configuration; turning off unwanted services or adding needed services; firewall configuration, etc.
Debian offers tools to do each of those, in the typical Debian-way. But, unfortunately, they aren’t obvious. No single front-end is available to allow simple access to them all. (If there is, then I’m wrong, but I’ve never found it when I’ve used Debian.)
Except that, while e.g. RedHat has used Hotplug and Discover for a long while, Project Utopia was only started ~ a year ago and is mostly userspace, and allows easy integration in the DE. The absence of it has little to do with Debian; its a problem with Linux in general.
For an outline of Project Utopia see http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3450
IMHO someone really needs to write an article on Debian for servers. Almost all the articles on Debian seem to be focussed on the desktop, but I feel that it’s strengths lie in servers.
Here are my reasons:
* Volunteer effort, organization has no bottom line to worry about and no shareholders to please
* Long release cycle
* Dependency handling
* No cutting edge software, extremely stable and compatible
* There is no one single entity looking after the distro, no company to go bust
* One command updating, easy to update a farm of Linux servers
* 3 tiered release system, Unstable/testing/stable
* Great community support, debianhelp.org, debian irc channel
Singular “they” referring to he or she is absolutely grammatically correct. Ask people with a literature or English language education.
However, I don’t think they should resort to they, when he can still refer to either he or she. “They” is useful for disambiguation when it is really needed in a particular context, but if you don’t care about the gender of the user in the whole documentation, there is no reason to use “they” — it’s longer, and it still has to be disambiguated from the plural “they”.
Correction — “‘They’ is useful for disambiguation” should read “is useful when the gender doesn’t matter”.
Once everyone is able to run Debian what will they try to ruin next, OpenBSD? People focus on what they can’t have, not on what they do have. What is wrong with an operating system that is not designed for the masses?
“I disagree that Debian’s advantage in apt/dpkg has been nullified by rpm, yum, up2date and apt4rpm. None of those work nearly as well. I haven’t used portage to comment on it.”
I don’t agree here. This was true in the past. I use Debian and SuSE almost in equal measure and I am absolutely impressed what an advanced tool apt4rpm for SUSE has become. It is constantly under active developmnent.
Debian apt, on the other hand, is not being developed very much, to the point that Debian recommends to use aptitude instead (which is indeed very advanced, but needs extra knowledge from the user)
dpi:
I agree that Project Utopia is promising, but my gripe isn’t about hardware detection in Debian so much as it is the lack of an obvious way to configure hardware once it is detected. Remember, I’m talking about new Linux users who haven’t a clue that something called “services” are running on their machine, or that something called Xorg/XFree86 needs to be configured to make their display look as good as it did in Windows. Frankly, however, even if you do knows those things, you still need to be aware that there is a peculiar “Debian way” to do all those things.
Debian resembles a big city with no street signs. If you get lost and ask a resident why the street aren’t marked, they’ll just say “If you lived here, you’d know your way around.”
Lumbergh:
Since when did acknowledging a complaint about sexist language become a “leftist” tenet? Or, are you asserting that the “right” doesn’t understand how language both reflects and molds our opinions?
‘They’ has been used as a singular since Chaucer.
Can’t wait to see the new Sarge or Sid to support installation on these interfaces.
Does anyone knows when the 2.6.10 kernel will be tested or the 2.6.9 patched for SATA AHCI?
If you can change settings on the motherboard, you can install in sata or pata mode and grab kernel 2.6.10-rc afterwards.
I’d like to talk about comparing apt/yum/portage and its ilk.
We’ve gotten to the point where these programs all do the same thing. The real advantage is not the code in apt, yum, or portage, it’s the central repository. People who complain about RPMs haven’t used them since the central repositories hit. The reason RPM got such a bad wrap is because people used search engines to install random third party rpms from joe’s linux website. When you install a bunch of rpms that are built with different libs, you get RPM hell.
I dare anyone who complains about RPM to actually use Red Hat, Mandrake, whatever today, and use it with the same caution you use apt or portage.
The fallacy of RPM is not in the format, it’s in the way that people used to use it. RPM, deb, pacman packages, etc, are all the same now. Sure there’s a bit of difference in archiving format, and the layout of the dependancy info, but they’re the same.
Apt, Yum, urpmi, pacman, portage, whatever, all do basically the same thing, discounting that portage compiles from source.
I think that to compare these systems now, in their maturity, the only way to get a meaningful comparision is to compare the repositories. What packages are available, how stable are they, how open to change is the structure of the tree?
Portage is awesome if you want a tree that changes hourly with almost no QA. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, many people want the latest and greatest as soon as possible, and that’s perfectly acceptable.
Fedora/Mandrake/SuSE package trees are great to build a base system. For me they miss a lot of critical softwares which I need to do my work. They’re certainly more supported, and probably easier to deal with if you don’t need a lot of uncommon software.
It’s Debian for me. I don’t expect major bumps in the way the system is laid out, I get new software by the time I need it, everything is completely stable. And it has all the software I need.
Good post, well balanced.
However as a user of both SUSE and Debian I wonder which packages needed for your work you don’t find in SUSE: please note that the 9.2 DVD has about 5 Gig worth of software once you deduct the 64 bit folder. And then there are the packages available from apt4rpm.
Not criticism mine, really interested.
Using ‘they’ in a singular sense to indicate gender ambiguity is a fairly accepted usage. Since there is no official ‘definition’ of correct English, all you can go off is the prevalance of various forms (and possibly their use in some oft-used ‘reference’ sources, like the OED or the Times). Using ‘they’ in this way has been going on so long that just flat out describing it as ‘incorrect’ isn’t very helpful.
the author picked a rather odd way to demonstrate to good points of debian…are there many distros that *don’t* put most configuration files in /etc and most documentation in /usr/share/doc ? Mandrake certainly does. If you want to throw some ‘debian is good’ points in to an article like this you can surely come up with something better than that!
What kind of stuff are you missing on Mandrake? Mandrake *loves* contrib packages. Please build Mandrake packages for them and upload them to contrib, assuming they’re not there already. One day we’ll match Debian’s package count.
(main+contrib+plf has around 9,000 now, 6.5k if you knock off lib* and *-devel)
I’m not sure what corners of the internet the author has been sniffing around, or what types of questions he’s asked, but in several years of using Debian I’ve never come across a single RTFM reply ot any of my questions.
I’ve run into several snags regarding installing applications (mainly from complling source) and lots of time I’ll e-mail the program developer/maintainer or an experienced user who’s posted similar workarounds to users in message boards. my responses have always been very positive as well as helpful.
Also for general questions there are lots of linux message forums on the net, mt favorite being the one on the Knoppix website.
the RTFM attitude did exist several years ago, but the linux community has grown and with it has come understanding that not everyone using the OS is a programmer.
RTFM is a bad advice because most OSS documentation is horrible/non-existant and normally doesn’t even contain the answer to the question asked. A better advice would be GYFT (google you fucktard).
You wrote:
Anybody read the second article? With regards to Debian removing “sexist language” from the documentation:
a number of Debian developers, particularly ones who speak English as a second language, questioned the need for the change and whether the replacement of “he” with “they” for the indefinite personal pronoun was grammatically correct.
That is very definitely not grammatically correct. “He” is a singular pronoun, “they” is a plural pronoun. So saying “when the user wants to install a package, they should open up Synaptic” is just plain wrong. It’s also pointless. In English, “he” can either be masculine or gender neutral, just as “man” can either refer to males or hu*man*s in general. If the gender of the user is not known, it is proper to use “he” in the gender neutral sense.
You are correct but then again have you noticed the average person today hasn’t a grasp of English, even if they are native speakers to either American, British or Canadian specific versions.
However, the reality is that many of the elitists in Debian are real pricks and I use Debian daily as my sole user and developer system (Sid specifically). Refreshingly to me this is not restricted to Debian. It is rampant across the Linux community. Have no fear, Windows and Apple have the share as well. Sun of course goes without saying as having their share of pricks.
It’s the nature of people when they get a bit of Knowledge they show an equal lack of Understanding which is why they aren’t ever viewed as having Wisdom.
I’m looking forward to the new Sarge release. I’ve got an 80G drive that is waiting for it.
Why not a regular expression like s?he ?!?… 😉
Need some coffe…I agree!
It would be great if Debian could be the best server distro first, not wasting time on graphical installers or easy configs.
Stable version is realy to conservative (old). Compare it with RH Server or Free/Net/OpenBSD. Other versions are not stable (unstable) or secure (testing).
Using either ‘he’ or ‘she’ to denote a singular entity, in the context of the Debian documentation, makes no difference to anyone. Frankly, if any person is so fixated on the word ‘he’ being a sexist word, this person probably has a looming sexual identity crisis. Lets create the word he-she or she-he for such a neutral-gender word (sarcasm intended).
Words like this have no effect on “real” sexism in this world. People who want to fight sexism should do so by lobbying for certain rights to be acknowledged and laws to be passed to combat all the problems that is rooted in sexist and other mindsets.
Rejection of any criticism is characteristic of a cult. Some of the article’s points were on target.
…and that’s where I stopped reading.
Labeling people as religious zealots off the bat is as bad as the folks who insist on referring to Microsoft as M$/Mickysoft/Micro$oft/… . Needlessly abusive and just as silly.
Another thing, I hate those ugly feminist atheist women and those faggots who think they are smart.
Yes, but the Debian logo is attractive.
Mary Tee
Don’t believe I labeled anyone as a religious zealot. I simply pointed to a truism. Certainly, even a casual reader here, or of any other Linux publication, knows that any acknowledgment that any piece of software is less than perfect meets with instant and emotional rebuttal from enthusiasts who attack the writer for having the nerve to have an opinion.
In other words, they assert that something must be wrong with the person, because the software cannot be wrong. That, to me, is cultish.
No offense to debian users, I use debian sarge myself.
But, corporate users want features that, I suppose, only the commercial distros can provide, and without corporate interest in Debian, I don’t think Debian will ever be that popular.
Some of features:
– Certified for Oracle
– “Common Criteria” security certified
– Certifications for admins, i.e. RHCE
– Sevice package included from vendor
Debian is very good, but I can’t see debian replacing redhat as the distro of choice for the corporate users.
Overall a decent read…
However, it reminds me of the age-old bs, “what linux needs to do to convert newbies”.
Folks do for some reason tend to overlook Libranet when talking about Debian Distro’s. I believe it resolved many of the authors current issues at least a year ago…
re: rtfm:
I’m a veteran of NG’s and discussion forums pre-dating the www. (YMMV)
It is a cheap and absolutely misleading analogy to liken being told to RTFM with paying for support only to be insulted.
The *net and *n*x community at large are the most selfless and giving of folks I’ve ever encountered. The only requirement ever made of those seeking to utilize the volunteer, unpaid time of their peers is to *respect* their time, talents, and abilities by doing *some* homework, then document what you have done, or put another way, availing yourself of the information repositories developed to negate the need to answer the same questions ad-nauseum.
What folks who choose to complain about RTFM miss is that when the signal to noise ratio hits a certain point it is no longer worth participating! RTFM is not nescessarily an insult, often an RTFM will be accompanied by a link or tip.
Naturally there are bullies and assholes online just as there are offline. If you aren’t interested in learning, pushing the envelope, and being more empowered, there are other/better os choices.
Regards,
-rml
I agree that Project Utopia is promising, but my gripe isn’t about hardware detection in Debian so much as it is the lack of an obvious way to configure hardware once it is detected.
..but thats part of the problem Project Utopia is to solve.
Remember, I’m talking about new Linux users who haven’t a clue that something called “services” are running on their machine, or that something called Xorg/XFree86 needs to be configured to make their display look as good as it did in Windows. Frankly, however, even if you do knows those things, you still need to be aware that there is a peculiar “Debian way” to do all those things.
1) That fragmentation is alive in every Linux distribution. I wouldn’t know it immediately on Gentoo or Slackware either.
2) I don’t see it as a problem because there are other Linux distributions which try to mitigate this. The Linux distributions focus more on user-friendliness and/or the desktop.
In other words, they assert that something must be wrong with the person, because the software cannot be wrong. That, to me, is cultish.
..except that you’re applying an observation on a bunch of people to thousands who you don’t know, haven’t spoken of, haven’t even heard of. Besides, your original post was about Debian whereas this one seems to be about Linux in general.
Remember: All Germans eat wurst, all Americans are religious zealots, all Frenchies are chauvenistic, all Italians drive far too hard. You know thats truth and you heard it first at stupidgeneralisations.com.
You may ask a perfectly valid question and receive a completely derogatory answer, such as “RTFM”
Of course people have to be nice and polite and those who are not are a******s, but what’s wrong (or derogatory) with the reference to the manual? Somebody spent days or weeks writing it, so let’s appreciate their work and read it?
…thats part of the problem Project Utopia is to solve.
Yes, but it won’t be telepathic or perfect. Users will still need to configure and optimize hardware according to their preferences, or when something is missed altogether or misconfigured.
We don’t need to wait for Utopia for distributions to include in their installation procedures a routine that lists the services that run by default, those that don’t, explains what they do and why you might or might not want to use them, and, finally, allows you to turn them on or off. Some current distributions provide a GUI tool that allows this after installation, others do not. I don’t consider efforts like that to be “dumbing down” Linux.
That fragmentation is alive in every Linux distribution.
Yes, and it is not a positive thing. It represents a diffusion of focus and energy.
….except that you’re applying an observation on a bunch of people to thousands who you don’t know….
Nope. I’m applying it to people who exhibit the behavior I described, whether I know them or not. That behavior is cultish.
Yes, but it won’t be telepathic or perfect. Users will still need to configure and optimize hardware according to their preferences, or when something is missed altogether or misconfigured.
Actually, it tries to be. It tries to minimize what you say as much as possible therefore, i’d say that work on this is better than improving the broken (hopefully soon useless) tools which are used as of now. Although Hotplug and Discover are still developed and included in Debian.
And… if its not user-friendly for person X (wether that be you, a newbie, our far-far-far-nephew or Melinda Gates) right now, while its not (immediately) fixed, then he/she choses something else. Fedora for example. Or Windows. Or a Debian-based distribution. Hurray for choice. I, for one, would chose Debian Sarge installer over Solaris/IRIX/Windows/Gentoo/Slackware any day.
We don’t need to wait for Utopia for distributions to include in their installation procedures a routine that lists the services that run by default
Doesn’t apply here, given Debian doesn’t install services which aren’t needed. It installs as less services as possible by default (to give you a rough idea, that includes the exclusion of SSH) though the user can select more. That is to say, if they know what they want. Various utilities such as Tasksel do this. In contrast, i don’t know what services Solaris, OpenVMS and Windows install and/or enable by default without looking up what they do. I personally would not care either as long as its as less and as secure as possible while allowing me to easily adjust this. Debian allows this for me. BSD allows this for me. Windows, though in less extend, allows this for me.
Nope. I’m applying it to people who exhibit the behavior I described, whether I know them or not. That behavior is cultish.
That’s great to know, but you did not specify who you referred to in your first post hence you were perceived as generalising/flaming/trolling which you always tend to do in Debian threads. Hard to understand, ehhh..?
“However as a user of both SUSE and Debian I wonder which packages needed for your work you don’t find in SUSE: please note that the 9.2 DVD has about 5 Gig worth of software once you deduct the 64 bit folder. And then there are the packages available from apt4rpm.”
I’ll give you the one which convinced me to switch to Debian….GUI BitTornado. I looked forver to not find an RPM of it for SUSE. And don’t tell me about some damn equivalent that uses the evil Java.
Yes, that is a good one. You can download BitTorrent GUI from apt4rpm but it doesn’t seem to work. Till SuSE 9.0 Bittorrent would integrate in the system. Till 9.1 I used the old BitTorrent shadowsclient tar.gz, but it doesn’t work anymore. It could be a bug in python-wxGTK.
However please notice that only recently Debian has been providing GUI BitTorrent clients.
On the other hand the original poster was talking about “tools needed for his work” and I am left wondering what they might be.
Also, contrary to common belief, I find SuSE less buggy than Debian. In any case I like them both, they are the only operating systems I use and I dual boot between them.
What we need is better documentation, not documentation that is politically correct. Good documentation will solve yours or my issues, PC-crapness like “they” instead of “he” won’t.
That kind of polishing is quite nice when your work is complete, though.
Mandrake has the original bittorrent (including the GUI) and BitTornado (including GUI) packaged. Both integrate into the MIME system if you install them, but they exclude each other (you can’t have both).
Yes, yes, I know…
If we could put together all the best features of every distro we would all have the OS of our dreams
Maybe not a bad idea after all?