What's all the hype over Ubuntu?

[Ian Chapman]

Les Mikesell wrote:

>> But I must admit, I never really understood that viewpoint as yum has 
>> basically eliminated "dependency hell" and wondered what was magically 
>> different about deb.
> 
> Try to find something that isn't included in the standard repository. 
> With fedora, you won't even find the names of additional repositories 
> documented, so you ask here.  You'll get several different answers and 
> if you are looking for Sun Java, none of them will apply.  For anything 
> else, like vlc or the Nvidia driver, you add all the recommended repos 
> and tell yum to install something and you'll get rpm conflicts.   With 
> ubuntu, you enable the pre-configured extra repositories, pick what you 
> want and you are ready to run it.

So it seems it's more about packaging strategy and what distros offer, 
rather than debs necessarily being inherently superior to rpm. I can 
understand what you've said in the context of Fedora and Ubuntu but Suse 
offers much of the same "non-free" stuff. Maybe Mandriva too I can't 
remember. I'd always assumed they were referring to the days when you 
tried to install program1.rpm which then said it needed libfoo.rpm, 
which in turn needed libbar.so.1 which you had to figure how which rpm 
it was in and so on, which is why I thought that viewpoint seemed outdated.

-- 
Ian Chapman.