First impressions really matter. This is also why I went Debian. You shouldn't b...

microtonal · 2025-05-22T06:56:50 1747897010

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.

anthk · 2025-05-22T12:57:34 1747918654

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.

LeFantome · 2025-05-22T23:45:20 1747957520

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).