On 12 Jan, Steve R. Hastings wrote: > 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".)
Well, it all happened about 5 months ago.... I'd started programming when I was just 8 on a BBC micro (which I still have!). I loved it, and really liked the very high subset of BASIC that came with it. I then moved on to Acorn RISC OS computers which also use a very similar BASIC, and developed a few applications on it. I then got a PC with Windows and started getting pissed off. I became very annoyed by the fact that all the configuration files are hidden away, and that you are never allowed to edit anything by hand. I tried BeOS for a while and was very impressed by it, but it did not support enough of my hardware and there wasn't enough software for it. So I tried Linux. Flicking through the various different homepages of the distributions of Linux, I decided that debian was the least pretentious, the most honest, and I really liked the whole philosophy of it. I downloaded most of the slink distro (on a 56K modem this takes a LONG time!) and then toyed with that for a bit before buying a potato set of disks. I havn't looked back since. I've no experience of other distros, but whenever I have to install linux elsewhere, I'll always use debian. It's not easy to learn, but all linuxi have a steep learning curve. I just really love the ability to know exactely why something is happening, and the power of being able to change so much and edit everything by hand. It's great. Matthew
