The Wandering Geek

Bruce Byfield has a post up in which he tells us why he is staying with Debian. I tend to agree, Debian is still my favorite Linux distro, primarily for its packaging system. Bruce mentions packaging, but also talks about Debian’s repositories and unique community. There are several comments along the lines of “Well, you could replace ‘Debian’ with any distribution name, and what you said would still be true”. I don’t agree - although most of the big distros now have large communities and decent packaging systems (Fedora/Yum, e.g.), they still don’t compare to Debian in either respect, nor can you ignore the commercial factor. I don’t have to worry about the motives of Debian, they tend to include features that make for happy users and sysadmins first. Red Hat, for example, uses Fedora as a testing ground for RHEL. They are up-front about that, but the motive is still there. I do agree that your perspective matters - if I used nothing but desktop Linux, I would probably choose Ubuntu as a favorite. Debian wins overall in my opinion for making my life as a sysadmin and power-user easy. It’s a distribution for generalists.