Hello Russell, On 2/20/18, Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
On Monday, 19 February 2018 8:36:04 PM AEDT Mark Trickett via luv-main wrote:
All computers need a system administrator. You and he need to both learn. It is a bit like a toaster, fail to clean and the crumbs get mouldy, a health risk, and the prospect of starting a fire. Too many expect to just turn on the toaster and not clean now and then, and treat the computer the same. They do not deserve even the technology of the stone age.
Hmm, I don't think I've ever cleaned a toaster. :-#
There are those who use for a year, then replace, and continue to overfill the landfills. A good toaster, looked after, should last. Properly built and cared for, with repairs, maybe somewhere upside of half a century. it is a matter of everyone being responsible. The same with computers, responsible choice of software and services, and not being Stef from Userfriendly who ill click on every link, deliberately.
As to whether the Debian package management, or the Red Hat derived ones, you need to find what works your way. The reason I go for Debian and such is the package management tools, especially the handling of dependencies. This is less of an issue with the higher level package management front ends for Red Hat based systems, but it is built into the base level and fully available with the Debian package management tools.
Also Debian has packages for almost everything you can imagine. Fedora has much less support for various packages and RHEL has even less.
Do be aware that there are other package management means, from Gentoo using source based and compiling everything, to the way Slackware uses tarballs, tape archives, a collection of concatenated files, usually also compressed, and a small amount of extra detail, but not to the levels of the RPM or DEB packages.
In most cases recommending Gentoo or Slackware is a bad idea. If you need to ask which distribution to use then Gentoo and Slackware aren't suitable for you.
Mentioned more for moving towards completeness. If you notice, I did express that the alternatives have limitations, but that some people see merit in that way of doing things. Regards, Mark Trickett