I am interested in why people prefer Debian to other Linux
distributions. Please explain the top few reasons why you chose Debian
rather than something else.
Perhaps we can collect the responses together, edit them, and put the
result up on the debian.org web page. I have looked and looked, both on
the Web and in the book store, and I have found few explanations of why
people prefer a particular distribution. (There is lots of "why you
should use Linux" but not much of "why I use Debian rather than
something else".)
Just to start things off, I'll give my story.
When I first got interested in Linux, I had only the dimmest
understanding of distros, and no Linux-using friends to mentor me. Thus
I got Red Hat. I later tried Corel Linux and Mandrake. (Mandrake, with
its graphical install and even graphical disk partitioning tools, is the
one I would recommend to a complete newbie wanting to give Linux a try
for the first time.)
But I have a policy of trying to use completely free stuff whenever
possible. I became interested in Debian because of the Debian policy
that requires software to be completely free. "If I invest my time
learning Debian," I thought, "it will pay off forever. I can just keep
burning copies and giving them away to all my friends."
I was told that Debian is always out of date, slow to adapt. And it
seemed true: here the Linux 2.4 kernel was just around the corner, and
Debian had only just released Potato, with 2.2! But as I kept reading
the web, I began to realize that with the apt-get tools, anyone who had
wanted 2.2 had been running it for a long time, and in fact it was easy
to stay updated with current stuff. I can run stable for servers and
testing for my desktop. Debian isn't behind the times!
So I jumped in, and I'm still trying to get things working, but I'm
convinced that Debian is for me.
