On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 2:56 PM Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
I don't feel like ever putting up with an rpm based distribution ever again. Having made both rpm and deb packages over the years, I am not surprised that the package quality is much higher on deb based systems.
I started with Debian because it came up first in an Alta Vista search. I installed it on a work PC. I had an SGI Indy at home. Aside from the Indy I ran Debian exclusively for eight years. Alex DeVries (spoke at TLUG) worked on the SGI port and was a Red Hat user. He helped me get Linux running on the Indy, my first look at Red Hat. It wasn't as elegant as Debian (okay it was ugly) but a lot of things still didn't work yet.. Florian Lohoff and Guido Guenther came from Germany for DebConf in 2002. I worked near the airport at the time. When I drove them to catch their flight home they stopped by the office. I had a Debian hard drive for the Indy by then but it was a bit of a chore to get it to boot. Guido automated it for me. After six years as the IT guy at an engineering firm I persuaded them to let me switch to Linux servers (from Netware and Exchange). They wanted an enterprise product so it was SLES, with RPMs and KDE. I tolerated it but ran Debian everywhere else, with GNOME or X-less. Two years later the company was acquired and Linux was expunged, replaced by a worldwide Microsoft agreement. When Behdad Esfahbod brought Jeff Waugh to speak at U of T, I installed Ubuntu on my first work laptop where it ran for 5-6 years. Marcel Gagne posted about the future GNOME Shell as something cool. I installed it and played with it for a few minutes. Jim Campbell posted on this list in 2011 that the GNOME docs team would be in town for a hackfest. They were writing docs for GNOME 3.0 and I went to help out. They had openSUSE GNOME Live CDs (more recent GNOME packages than what I was able to install), so I switched. Two years later I was at Red Hat in Brno for another hackfest and took the opportunity to install Fedora, which I'm still running. I have an ASUS Transformer where I run Debian. Mike