Comment by speakspokespok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speakspokespok | Hacker News Reader

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First impressions really matter. This is also why I went Debian. You shouldn't be getting marked down for saying it.

Many of us were running on 28.8 dial-up. Internet search was not even close to a solved problem. Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process. Finding and manually downloading rpm dependencies was slow and hard. Same era when compiling a kernel went overnight or over the weekend. You didn't download an ISO you bought a CD or soon a DVD that you could booted off of.

Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.

Debian and Suse were fun and fit perfectly into the Web 1.0 world; RedHat was corporate. SystemD was pushed by RedHat.

Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process

One friend and I had a competition who could make the smallest kernel configuration still functional on their hardware. I remember that at some point we could build it in ten minutes or so. This was somewhere in the nineties, I was envious of his DX2-50.

Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.

One of the really huge benefits of S.u.S.E. in Europe in the nineties was that you could buy it in nearly every book shop and it came with an installation/administration book and multiple CD-ROMs with pretty much all packages. Since many people did not have internet at all or at most dial-up, it gave you everything to have a complete system.

Yes, I remember that too. I about a 3 DVD set of Debian Sarge. 2 DVD with everything and the 3rd was about source packages.

You are mixing a lot of history there.

Red Hat had packages but not package management at first. However, the same is true of Debian. It depends when you used them.

Red Hat Linux branched into RHEL (corporate) and Fedora (community).

SuSE went down a similar road to Red Hat and has both OpenSUSE and SLE these days. Fedora is less corporate than OpenSUSE is.

Debian is still Debian but a bit more pragmatic and a bit less GNU these days (eg. non-free firmware).

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