Debian woody v. potato v. Mandrake [was: Good CJK distro]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "B0Ti" == B0Ti  <9915104t@example.com> writes:

    B0Ti> I'm two keystrokes away from starting the debian download. I
    B0Ti> was going for the unstable, but what you've said here
    B0Ti> doesn't sound very good.

Well, I use a lot of pre-production software in my daily work.  My
documents live on a Coda file system, I edit in a bleeding edge
XEmacs.  My TeX stuff is an unholy mess of teTeX, platex, and homebrew
styles.  Coda especially has been a little flakey recently; I spent
about 2.5 hours on it yesterday, and ended up rebooting (which seems
to have solved whatever it was).  I'm used to uptimes (for my mail
XEmacs, not Linux! Linux is longer) of weeks (downtime is normally
limited to University power outages :( ).

You're a CS type, anyway, right?  So that shouldn't faze you; it's
really no worse than the typical office worker's experience with
Windows95+Office.  Also, I'm often working from a remote machine
(home), which means that rebooting means overnight downtime if
something goes wrong---I want that server rock-stable.  But I wouldn't
mind it for a workstation ... I drink enough pepsi to not mind
rebooting while I'm off at the jidohanbaiki.

The one thing that does get annoying about Debian unstable is that
with package releases coming very rapidly, you often find that a
dependency hasn't been released.  There are also a lot of broken
dependency declarations that get fixed a few hours later with a new
release.  This, combined with the sheer rate of release of updates and
new packages, means you really have to do an upgrade twice a week, or
find yourself spending a couple of hours on it when you finally do.

OTOH, there are a lot of ShinyThings[tm] in woody.  I really don't
think that someone who changes distros just for the fun of it needs to
be scared of Debian unstable.

    B0Ti> Should I get the 2.2 release (aka 'potato') rather then
    B0Ti> woody ?

No.  potato is really ancient; I doubt you'll see any advantage to it
over mandrake, unless you want to do a lot of self-compilation and
source tweaking.  Then I would recommend it because of mandrake's
known bad judgement w.r.t. their mods to upstream code.

    B0Ti> Or should I just stick with mandrake? ;-)


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