Saturday, May 10, 2008

Why I like Debian?

Debian is my favourite GNU/Linux Distro for the following reasons:-
1. It has the best packaging system (APT) in the world.
2. It is run by a community and not influenced by any company.
3. It has one of the largest number of packages and supports the most number of architectures. Due to this I can work on any architecture without changing the basics. i have seen debian working even on a small arm board.
4. It is flexible. It is easy to customise and this is the reason why so many distributions have been spawned by it including Ubuntu, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, Mepis and many more.
5. They have the best quality control I have seen in any distribution.
6. You have the option between installing source packages and binary packages.
7. Everything I use is free. If it is not I am made aware of it. They fight for freedom. (A special set of people debian-legal take care of such issues).
8. They are one of the oldest distributions (since 1993) and know their job well.
9. I have the option to choose between stable and new packages.
10. Using debian is fun.
11. There are many sites like debianhelp.org which help you if you get stuck.
12. Many people complain that their releases are slow. But I find the testing version good enough for use. So I am not worried about that.
13. backports.org and debian-multimedia.org often gives packages which are not available so I am not really at a loss too.
14. Due to large number of packages and libraries even when I download the sources I usually get the libraries easily from the repos.
15. I have a lot of options for customisation.
16. Many useful tools are available.

The list could go on and on. Due to all these reasons I recommend Debian GNU/Linux to all.

2 comments:

Narendra Sisodiya said...

great ,,,
but a normal user think only two thing,,

1) How easy to configure without any troubleshooting

2) Is that popular OS,, ??

Gajendra said...

It is easy to configure since the philosophy is simple. Once it is known you can do anything.
And yes it is a popular OS. Thats why it has so many offshoot distros.