On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 02:27:32PM +0800, JM Ibanez wrote: > Offhand, having worked with Debian and Slackware, here is how I'd > characterize the two distros: > > Slackware > - Very barebones > - Very stable > - "Masochistic" > - Very techie oriented (i.e. not very newbie-friendly) > > Debian > - Very flexible > - Easy to upgrade/update > - Very techie oriented, but can be newbie-friendly (with the exception > of dselect...) >
Huh? dselect IMHO is *the* best tool around for large-scale upgrades and such... I know a plain apt-get dist-upgrade is good, but at least with dselect you get the opportunity to *choose* which packages to upgrade. In fact, in my recent upgrade, I only got to download some 250+ mb of packages; if I just did apt-get, it would have been 450+... Yun nga lang, you have to rtfm before using dselect. Actually, the online help's helpful enough, but for the average user, it is difficult indeed. I guess that's just a subtle reminder that Debian's a "hacker's distro" from the good old days of Linuxen... > If you think you know Linux well enough to go by the shell most of the > time, and you're installing on a barebones and/or old/low-end box, I'd > go with Slackware if you know you're not expecting to update things > often. However, caveat emptor: Slackware is painful to most people, > and can be a hassle working with, especially installing or setting up > software (without a precompiled Slackware package tarball, for > example). There is no such thing as dependencies with a vanilla > Slackware package tarball(*). You have been warned. > I'd like to try Slack sometime... hopefully when dsl's 500 pesos per month *unmetered* I'll get my box hooked and dl Slackware 10... > Debian, on the other hand, holds its weight pretty well. The > precompiled packages available for the distro is huge-- often, makes > you want to stop and think, just to figure out which ones you really > need. apt-get is a life saver, especially when you have to install a > package and don't know what's needed, as it automatically grabs > dependencies. The large array of choices has its drawbacks-- you have > to really stop and think, and not get overwhelmed. > True. Debian isn't for those who would just sit at the dark and play with toys: it's a serious OS for serious folks. But of course, that doesn't mean you can't have fun ;-) TMTOWDI, and that's the spirit FOSS (and Debian in particular) would like everyone to keep in mind. However, more choices means more permutations means more fuzziness, so always keep in mind that there's always a risk (just like those extreme athletes who do wakeboarding, xbmx and free bungee--they get broken bones at times ;-).. Cheers, Zakame -- |=-------------ZAK B. ELEP (Registered Linux User #327585)-------------=| || Web: http://zakame.spunge.org GPG ID: 0xFA53851D || || http://zakame.homelinux.org ICQ UIN: 33236644 || || Location: Daet, Camarines Norte Running Linux 2.6 || |=----------1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D----------=| Debian - When you've got better things to do than to fix a borken system
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