Re: Apt good, rpm so-so
[Author here]
> True but you missed out Mandrake.
I did, you're right.
It was _much_ easier, to the extent that circa 2003, my lodger borrowed what she thought was a blank CD from the spindle in my office while I was at work and _accidentally_ installed Mandrake on her PC.
But I was never a big fan.
The early versions were just Red Hat Linux with KDE, with all the nastiness of original RPM.
The GUI tools weren't all that. The first time I tried a full install on a testbed PC, DiskDrake nuked 9 partitions and erased about half a dozen other OSes on my PC. (I think it was for a group test of Linux distros I wrote for PCW in about 2000.) I was _livid._
APT-RPM was promising but the trouble is that on distros not designed with it in mind, while it made _installing a new package_ easier, it became unreliable _upgrading_ existing packages.
If you tried to upgrade something present on your computer that APT-RPM did not install itself, the chances were high you'd nuke your PC. There were 3 likely outcomes:
* At best, that app stopped working and you had an even more painful session of dependency-chasing.
* More often, multiple other apps stopped working because their dependencies suddenly didn't match. (No overall dependency tree, no testing for overlaps etc.) Not only that but there was a fair chance your desired app _also_ stopped working.
* Worst case: your PC no longer boots, or it does but there's no desktop or something.
Ask me how I know. Go on.
I was experimenting with APT-RPM on SUSE Pro when Ubuntu arrived, and that is one reason I switched so fast. I'd had to reinstall SUSE multiple times because of APT-RPM-inflicted damage already.
So, yes, true, not all end-user-targeting distros were paid-for, but the free options, while better than, say, Debian or Slackware, were -- shall I be diplomatic and say "flawed"?