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Re: [LUG] Marketing Linux

 

Rob Beard wrote:
> 
> From experience, there isn't that much difference between yum & apt,
> well at least it doesn't appear to have much difference to me.

The apps do a similar job.

yum seems to be painfully slow in my experience, although I suspect
people just needed to persuade it to cache more on those machines.

But other than that the magic is down to the quality and consistency of
the packages the tools use, here is where Debian wins hands down, purely
through effort extended in making everything integrate nicely, but you
pay for it in being a few releases behind sometimes. of course most apps
integrate the same way, with the same dependencies each release, which
is why life in "Debian Unstable" isn't so very different from life with
many other distros. It is all too easy to assume the magic is in "apt",
but "apt" isn't particularly amazing as such tools go (although I
wouldn't want to have to invent it from scratch).

In the server environment it has been possible historically to build
from source where you need to step outside the packaging system, but in
desktops, and with growing complexity of what people want to achieve,
this is requiring more and more skill, and taking longer and longer. As
such you need to share that burden more, which means more systems
becoming "Debianesque", or addressing the same issue in other ways, more
hybred packages, or packages that readily reconfigure themselves (portage?).

It will be difficult because those packages won't be built by one
company, but might be collected and organised like Redhat and Debian do now.

Alternatively we could see a shaking down, or flattening of the hierarchies.

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