I’m writing this post from within Debian. Do I like Debian overall? No. Not really. The install went smoothly and the installer is pretty easy to follow and understand if you’ve done this before. I find it really similar to the Slackware installer so if you can do one you should be able to do the other. Perhaps I just didn’t see it, but there didn’t appear to be anyway to select your desktop upon install. I was more or less stuck with Gnome. Which isn’t terrible but I was really looking forward to trying KDE again before it goes 4.0.
The distro itself feels sluggish to me. The default install come bloated with a ton of packages I didn’t want. It feels slow compared to Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo. When compared to Ubuntu though its right on par. So I guess its all in what your looking for. It comes with Ice Weasel instead of Firefox, which I find stupid personally. Thats another story though.
Summing it up I find it hard to really distinguish between Debian, Slackware, and Arch. They all three seem to shoot for the same goal. Well, maybe not, but if your new to this game or you don’t care you’d probably be hard pressed to understand and see the differences in philosophy between the three distros. Slackware shoots for stability, Arch for speed, and Debian for a balance of the two. But in reality the differences are pretty slim in my opinion. Debian would be the most user friendly, and the most bloated. But somehow, through the course of time, user friendly has become synonymous with bloat. Which is pretty sad but nothing I can change or am willing to change at the moment.
Try Debian you’ll probably like it if your a binary type. As for me, Debian has been fun, but it’ll be gone by tonight.
Enjoy the Penguins!
Interesting post. I wonder; what is your main distribution? If you have an Amd64 processor did you try 64-bit Debian. I think it would be intersting to do some objective research into the speed of each distro. Of course we need to define speed first. (IU agree that these distro’s feel sluggish especially in comparison with Gentoo, but I wonder if t is measurable)
Aniruddha, you bring an excellent point. My answer in short is I don’t claim that anything I say is objective. Its all subjective to my “feel” of it. So put as much in that as you’d like.
And finally, yes, I used Debian for x86_64 processors, and my mainstay distro is Gentoo.
Lets get busy then
. I hope you haven’t deleted Debian yet it would be intersting to run some benchmarks. The only one I can think of right now is the time command.
Funny that you used Debian x86_64 I always thought it was lighting fats at first until it slowly begins to detoriate. My main OS is also Gentoo btw.
For starters here’s some data from Gentoo box
time firefox
No running windows found
real 0m8.726s
user 0m1.617s
sys 0m0.178s
$ time oowriter
real 0m5.669s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.006s
P.S. Maybe it is an better idea to open a separate thread in the Gentoo forums
P.S.
I opened a thread here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4275860.html#4275860
Debian bloated? have you tried selecting/unselecting things in the ‘tasksel’ application?
Debian also has metapackages for things like kde and gnome, so ‘apt-get install kde kdm’ or ‘apt-get install gnome gdm’ is not too hard.. There is also the nslug which is supported by Debian.
I have install Debian recently and KDE is the default desktop, it all depends on which iso you downloaded for the installation.
If less “bloat” is what you are looking for, maybe you can try the netinstall and use something like fluxbox. It will feel lighter
“Perhaps I just didn’t see it, but there didn’t appear to be anyway to select your desktop upon install. I was more or less stuck with Gnome.”
You sure can select desktop when you are installing Debian. Here is how you can select which desktop you want to install.
1) Boot from the installation media (CD, DVD, Netinst CD, USB stick etc)
2) When you see the first Debian installer screen with black background and Debian logo, write this line into prompt on screen:
installgui tasks=”kde-desktop, standard”
3) Press enter
Debian installer will now start in the graphical mode and it will install KDE -desktop instead of Gnome. You can also choose to install xfce if you want.
If you are installing from CD you can alternatively download CD #1 which installs KDE by default. Similarly you can download CD #1 which installs Xfce by default.
If you want to have more control over what packages are installed, you can start Debian installer in the expert mode. You just need to replace ‘installgui’ with ‘expertgui’. Eg. if you want to start installer in the graphical expert mode and if you want to install KDe instead of Gnome write this to installer prompt:
expertgui tasks=”kde-desktop,standard”
Essentially, any distribution with its own package manager will become bloated. Even Arch is gaining weight. There is no way to escape it. The reasons are simple. Without bloat, each user would have to maintain his own scripts and dependency graphs. This is a huge duplication of effort. Common options will be factored out by the community and put into the default installation. When these options are not /exactly/ what /you/ want, “you” call it bloat.
Debian has been around for a long time, and has established a big ecosystem of software policy and practice. A lot of high quality software has been written to help automate system administration. Without it, you would have to write your own scripts. With it, you only need to look up the documentation. That said, since it is unfamiliar to “you”, it is bloat. Since it brings in dependencies you don’t care about, it is “bloat”.
A minimal Debian installation is just a few hundred megabytes, and most of it is Debian tools.