Mark Suter wrote: > Folks, > > How common is the "Debian last" practice, that is, try other > distributions (including non-GNU/Linux) and then come to Debian > to stay?
<cut> <snip> While the "Debian last" practice is probably the most common way that users become "Debian" users, it's in my opinion the poorest. When I decided that I had had enough of "Gates garbage", I gathered as much information as I could about the different distributions and found that the GNU concept was being followed most closely by Debian - that was enough for me. So I placed an order at CheapBytes - Hamm had just been released. Meanwhile I bought a linux book that contained a copy of Caldera and tried to get that running. A week later my Debian disks arrived (Caldera was still not running). I stuck the Debian 2.0 CD in my drive, loaded Hamm (it ran right out of the box - so much for the "hard to install" myth), and I haven't looked back since. Since that time I've loaded Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake and Slakeware on spare hard drives just to see how well they perform. I found that none are really any easier than Debian, they just have fewer choices and packages. I've also watched co-workers pay good money for RedHat and Mandrake and never get them to run correctly on their system. Try convincing them that they're easy for first time users. I guess what I'm saying is that anyone that's advising newbys to start with other distributions and then switch to Debian are actually doing them a disservice. If you don't think so just scan the archives of this list and see how many questions there are like "on my (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe etc.) box <something> worked perfectly. Why doesn't Debian work right". The answer in virtually every case is that Debian does *work right*, but the user is trying to use a non-debian non-GNU method, configuration, or tool. IMHO if it's not GNU and/or it's not Debian dump it. *Debian First* John -- Powered by the Penguin
