Debian
Those that know me know I am a Red Hay guy and always will be (so long as there is still a shred of dignity in that name). I have however been toying around with Debian for the last year or so. I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop on and off for the last two years but its NOT Debian …
I decided last weekend to try Debian after my Ubuntu starting going nuts (I had been using hardy alpha and kept updating all the way to stable until POP, it all exploded). I decided to try Debian and after a quick net install decided to try out the desktop in all its glory with all the eye candy and other junk I just love to have flashing around my desktop.
Debian is Linux no matter which way you look at it and it has its own set of peculiar quircks but it is defintely usable. I am actually quite surprised that everything just works, especially suspend and hibernate although it did freeze at one point while resuming from hibernation .. thats just one in about 7 hibernate attempts so far so thats 6 succesful attempts compared to none in <name you distro here>.
Even though I am starting to like Debian more and more I can see why it has not received much attention from the Enterprise Linux users club. HP, IBM, Dell and all the other “big boys” provide 0% support for their hardware on Debian and as much as I like tinkering around and compiling stuff all day I just cant imagine going to some of our larger clients and saying “hey, let me compile this driver and see if it works” or “lets try alien and see if that Red Hat specific RPM works on Debian” … so, this is the same reason why I am unable to promote Debian on our own little front to a large portion of our clients.
Having said all that I feel that Debian is a very strong distribution, much more than Ubuntu and some of the other release really, really, really often and buggy half pieced together pieces of software distributions.
Time permitting I will add a new page to this blog with interesting Debian things I come across. Interesting things such as how to disable firewire from loading and how to spot if youre talking to a bot in an irc channel or not…dpkg comes to mind on freenode.net #debian 