1) Zealots — They consider debian the only solution.
2) Lack of enterprise support — FAI (fully automated install) is debians attempt at what RedHat’s Kickstart kicks ass at. An easy way to image/build many machines very quickly. Besides this debian-stable’s software is comonly too stale, while debian-unstable, well, is completely unstable. Debian-testing, might be the best, but there is no way to pick a date and keep only the critical things you need. Sure Redhat can be a PITA but at least it supports it’s distros fully.
3) Support — (lack there of) — The people i talked to on IRC consider anyone that has any problems as a “newb” and that they obviously must be an idiot.
4) apt-get is cool — (damn, this was a why debian sucks list, but its not all suckage.)
5) Packages are modified — Debian has a habbit of taking packages like Apache HTTPD and completely changing its defaults, and adding their own patches, while this may seem good at first, it makes pinning down problems and mis-configration more difficult.
Well. Thats good enough for now.
You are 100% correct, and the guy behind me agrees.
May be Debian is a school of thought. But I can’t agree with you if you say it sucks. I found many Debian based distros such as Mepis and Xandros to be really productive, fast and easy. I am not sure of the server deployment, but if the desktop deployment is compared I must say Mepis (a Debian distro) is better than any Redhat Enterprise Desktop.
Well, that’s my personal opinion.
Really good points - and yet, I find myself liking Debian a lot. This is basically because, once I got it configured, it became ludicrously stable while still maintaining a notable degree of easy expandability (primarily due to apt.)
1) and 3) are completely spot on - the people in the support channel are assholes, and each time I’ve had an issue it’s taken twenty minutes before some snobby jackass tells me to use the man command - and then that’s it. Once, I managed to completely kill Gnome - I tried swapping gconf directories for symlinks to my other partition’s gconfs - and as a result, no new windows would open. On top of this, I had booted with the wrong video driver (rendering tty1-6 out of commission, so I had no way of entering commands) so I just restarted, which fixed the problem.
When I told the guy in #debian, he flipped out and told me that I was under no circumstances to restart a Debian computer and that it was never necessary except when changing kernel. I told him to go to hell.