Friday, April 8, 2011

Dedoimedo on LMDE

Hm. Dedoimedo gives Linux Mint Debian Edition a great review; compare that to his less-than-glowing review of Debian Squeeze.

I noticed that in the LMDE review, he made no mention of the tons of updates necessary to bring LMDE up to speed. LMDE needs regular "snapshot" .iso's (sort of like PCLinuxOS does with their quarterly releases), in my opinion.

I do agree with some of his points about Squeeze, though. Debian isn't up there with other distros when it comes to the out-of-the-box experience, or when it comes to the installation experience. SalineOS, for example nailed it here where Squeeze didn't.

But, as with most reviews, his focuses on initial impressions, not how things go over the long-term. I'm still not sold on either LMDE (based on Debian Testing) or SalineOS (based on Debian Squeeze) over Debian Stable when it comes to long-term usage. I don't mind struggling with a Debian Stable installation once every few years, knowing that it will end up being trouble-free and solid for the duration. LMDE and SalineOS are still too new for me to feel confident about how things will look down the road; and, in the end, LMDE and SalineOS are still essentially one-man-distro spin-offs of "the real thing." Not that I have anything against one-man-distros...

Since I prefer to use Stable instead of Testing anyway, I have yet to install LMDE; quite happy so far with Saline, though.

Not trying to knock either of those two distros -- I'm actually really glad to see both of them out there (along with Mepis). Both of them do something that Debian doesn't: They give users an easy Debian installation (or, and easier one than they can get from "straight" Debian), and a great out-of-the-box experience.

But, neither LMDE nor SalineOS can replace Debian Stable for me here. Yet. We'll see how things go in the future.

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