# Comments on "Why I'm staying with Debian"

Bruce Byfield has a post up in which he tells us [why he is staying
with Debian][1]. I tend to agree, Debian is still my favorite Linux
distro, primarily for its [packaging system][2]. Bruce mentions
packaging, but also talks about Debian's repositories and unique
community. There are several comments along the lines of "Well, you
could replace 'Debian' with any distribution name, and what you said
would still be true".

I don't agree - although most of the big distros now have large
communities and decent packaging systems (Fedora/Yum, e.g.), they
still don't compare to Debian in either respect, nor can you ignore
the commercial factor. I don't have to worry about the motives of
Debian, they tend to include features that make for happy users and
sysadmins first.

Red Hat, for example, uses Fedora as a testing ground for RHEL. They
are up-front about that, but the motive is still there. I do agree
that your perspective matters - if I used nothing but desktop Linux,
I would probably choose Ubuntu as a favorite. Debian wins overall in
my opinion for making my life as a sysadmin and power-user
easy. It's a distribution for generalists.

[1]: http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/why-im-staying-with-debian/
[2]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/articles/historical-blog-posts/20060408-apt-debians-killer-app.txt
.