Why I chose Debian Linux
I recently switched to Quantact for hosting, and one of the first choices you have to make is which Linux distribution you want to have installed. I’ve previously used both RedHat and SuSe, and read through the Linux from Scratch book. At work it’s a Windows world, made saner by Cygwin. Recently I bought my first computer in the UK, and it’s a Mac. I’d never used Debian GNU/Linux before. So why did I pick it?
I chose Debian because of its security. It comes in several flavours, but before anything gets into the ‘stable‘ release it has been reviewed for security holes. That should mean that I won’t have to spend too much time worrying about or monitoring my server. Just a quick security update for the latest patches every week or so.
Now that I’ve gone through the twin learning curves of setting up a server and of a new distribution, I’ve got a conclusion: Debian rocks!.
- package dependencies are handled for you – install mod_php and it’ll adjust your apache2 installation to have the correct threading model
- sysadmin scripts are standardized – fewer arcane commands to learn and look-up repeatedly