This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: [hartr@redhat.com: Re: Keyboard switching xterm windows?] From: marc_news@merlins.org (Marc MERLIN) Date: 27 May 1999 02:30:39 GMT On 18 May 1999 11:01:41 -0700, George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com> wrote: >Also, market share != quality. Who sells more burgers, McDonalds or >In-and-Out. Whose is better? Red Hat will probably never match the quality Yep, we do agree here. >of Debian's packages simply because Debian has several times as much staff >as Red Hat does. And yes, hopefully in the next few weeks there will be >people that are paid full time to work on Debian too. While this is true, Debian developers have in return more difficulties to cooperate because there are so many (for instance PAM is taking a long time to get in), and you can't tell them what to do since they're not paid, so no one takes care of the unfun work. For reference, I just installed slink on my work system, and it asked me no less than 3 or 4 times what the device to for my CD-Rom was (when I had booted the Debian CD off it), and there was no consistent way to configure my mouse (I had to configure it in gpm and XF86Setup independently, and XF86Setup sucks compared to Xconfigurator). Yes, apt-get is nice but the install still sucks, and all the polishing issues that are boring to take care of (and yet sometimes non trivial) will take a while before they get done. Just to say that I had to do things to get my system running that weren't obvious and that would have turned away any beginner. As far as I'm concerned, debian is a great distribution for sysadmins who already know what they're doing, but it's one of the last things I'd recommend to a beginner. ===