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What do I want in a Linux distribution?
Quoting: What do I want in a Linux distribution? | Noodles’ Emptiness —
I’ve been a Debian user since 1999, and a Debian developer since 2000. Given recent events it’s worth thinking about why that that is, and why I haven’t switched to something else in the past quarter century.
My first Linux distro was Slackware, off a CD in a book, some time in the mid 90s. After starting university I ran SUSE for a while, then moved to RedHat (both back before they had commercial variants significantly different to what was available freely). The main motivation for switching was package management; I was running a machine at home and a machine at university, and keeping track of what was installed on each, and what versions, was getting annoying with Slackware. Most of the folk I knew were running RedHat, and I mostly played with SUSE because I’m contrary before realising it was different enough that I couldn’t easily make use of 3rd party RPMs.
I came to Debian via friends in Cambridge, who spoke highly of it. The first Debian machine I installed was fourier, the initial host for Black Cat Networks, and I never looked back.
(For additional context I should also point out I have contributed, in the distant past, to, and run, OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded, and FreeBSD.)