It's about that time again...

[denny]

Time, that is, for my bi-annual voyage of discovery with respect to the question "I wonder if Debian is usable yet?"

It definitely seems to be every two years or so that I decide it's time I moved away from Red Hat and toward Debian. For reasons that could largely be illustrated by pointing out their TLDs. And every couple of years, I decide that I just can't get the hang of Debian and I stumble gratefully back into the soothing embrace of the distribution I'm familiar with.

Anyway, I think it's time to play with Debian again. I've moved all the files from my laptop to various corners of my workstation hard drive (which was once Stupidly Large and now appears to be Remarkably Full - how time flies). Once I've posted this, I shall be rebooting and starting some kind of install procedure - I just hope it's a bit friendlier now than it was two years ago.

Hopefully my next post will be from a Debian system on this laptop... but I can't help feeling reassured by remembering that there's a functioning Red Hat system in the spare room should this get a bit tricky. Like it usually does. :)

Comments

[reddragdiva]

<darth vader>I think you should consider FreeBSD.</darth vader>

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

*grin*

The Ports is strong in this one?

[reddragdiva]

I was gobsmacked to see how easy FreeBSD is to set up on a desktop. I suspect a laptop is a little more work - as laptops are - but, y'know, it's always nice to use a system written by computer scientists of decades' experience rather than caffeinated crack monkeys high on Stallman. I am amazed how annoyed I always used to get at Linux and how FreeBSD fails to annoy me in precisely those ways. It's just, like, well constructed and stuff.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I love Debian and I hope it grabs you this time, because I can't imagine why anyone puts up with less. The trouble is that you usually see the worst of an OS when you come to install it... If you can, get a Debian geek by your side when you do the actual install. Once you have a running Debian system you'll be in a better place to start assessing it.

Another note of caution. If you work with Debian, and do things its way, it will work miracles for you. If you once try to work against it, it will screw things up for you bigtime. Never work behind its back. It doesn't care what you install in /usr/local, but if you, say, start moving things about in /usr/bin you will enter a world of pain...

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

What he said. Debian rocks my world (or maybe I'm just easily pleased). I had olethros help me with the initial install, and now I'm in Little Debian Heaven. Join us :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that you usually see the worst of an OS when you come to install it.

The Debian installation stuff is really far behind the installers of most of the other distributions I've tried - like, several years behind. I feel like I'm installing Red Hat 5.2 again. It seems a shame when their package management tools themselves are so universally lauded.

If you can, get a Debian geek by your side when you do the actual install.

I suspect that would have been invaluable, but unfortunately I'm out in the sticks, and I'm one of the more knowledgable in MK LUG. Scary thought though that is :) There seem to be a lot of Mandrake users around here for some reason.

Never work behind its back.

Ah, yes. I did try dropping a theme into the sawfish directory in /usr/share last night and end up with an irreversibly hosed install of GNOME... not quite sure what all that was about, there was an upgrade to unstable going on around the same time so it could have been anything really.

[stuartl.livejournal.com]

I am a relatively recent (year or so) Debian convert. Debian's install procedure is great, but only if you don't want a GUI.

The Debian X11 auto configure thingy just Doesn't Work™ on most laptops or unusual desktops.

If you can install the text mode system and then manually install and configure X11 you'll probably be fine.

And yes, being completely biased, I'd say that Debian is the best Linux distribution out there, but that's largely because my linux systems have to be up 24/7 and none of them even have the X11 libraries installed...

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Heh. I flirted briefly with trying to install my own version of X but failed. So I tried getting the latest version of Gnome (2.4) but that turned out to be a mammoth task (the build directory gets over 1.6GB in size!!). So I'm sitting here with an older version of X and an older version of Gnome which crashes with sound in X *sigh*.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Debian is the One True Way.. all it's files are lined with glory... *ahem*. Yeah, Debian's okay, y'know? :)