Forget Hardy

[Les Mikesell]

Peter Garrett wrote:
> 
> I also came to Debian through Knoppix, originally. Knoppix was never
> intended as a hard-drive install, as Klaus Knopper himself often said.
> For example, a dist-upgrade from a Knoppix install was pretty much
> guaranteed to break, and Knoppix used a mix of stable, testing and
> unstable, which is close to heresy from a Debian viewpoint. :)

...and the fact that it had to be in order to work points out the 
problem with debian and why most of us aren't using it.

> Someone will probably pull me up on this - but as far as I can see,
> technically the Ubuntu way and the Debian way are practically
> identical.

Except when they aren't.

> I think the issue with both "Debian" distros and Gentoo is that both
> have quirks.

All systems have quirks.  The difference is in how many are 
automatically handled by the installer and administration code and how 
many waste user/administrator time to get a working system. Ubuntu comes 
out ahead in this respect, but as a side effect it permits, even 
encourages, people who don't fully understand it to have systems that 
mostly work.  And these people will sometimes answer questions on mail 
lists incorrectly with something that just happened to work for them 
which is more of a trigger for rambling threads like this than the 
newbie question that was posted in the first place.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com