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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

I have to confess that my early experiences with RedHat as a teenager and dealing with the nightmareish RPM dependencies soured me from the distribution. I went to Debian and then its many descendants and never looked back; APT seemed magical in comparison.

I assume they have a package manager that resolves dependencies well now? Is that what an RPM wrangler is?

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This is a very outdated view. dnf runs circles around apt. Try it out, or at least find man pages on the ole 'net and see what it can do.

Probably the thing I like the most is transactional installation (or upgrades/downgrades/removals) of packages with proper structured history of all package operations (not just a bunch of log records which you have to parse yourself), and the ability to revert any of those transactions with a single command.

I had the same experience as the OP in the beginning of the century. I've built a lot of RPM packages back then and it was clear that system of dependencies built into RPM format itself (not apt or dnf, this is dpkg level in terms of Debian) was poorly thought out and clearly insufficient for any complex system.

I've also migrated to Debian and it felt like a huge step forward.

I'm on Arch now, BTW.

The equivalent of RPM on Debian is the .deb package format. The equivalent of apt is dbf (or yum before it or up2date before that).

Red Hat is just old enough to exist before package managers existed on Linux. It was not there at first on Debian either.

Slackware still has not package manager really.

Possibly I'm just more used to apt (though fedora was my first linux), but I've found apt has better interfaces for what I'm trying to do (e.g. querying the state of the system and ensuring consistency across machines), and I've not found an equivalent to aptitude for dnf.

Side-note, the other difference I've noticed is Debian (and presumably its derivatives) has better defaults (and debconf) for packages, so whereas stock config would work on Debian, on Rocky I have to change config files, install missing packages etc.

rpm dependencies has been a solved problem with yum (and now dnf) for about two decades.

Yum was borrowed from yellow dog Linux.

Which in turn was based on RHEL/CentOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_Linux

To be pedantic, yum was not from Yellow Dog, it is Yellow dog Updater Modified after all. It was a rewrite of the Yellow Dog Updater by people at Duke University. (Yellow Dog Linux was based on Red Hat.)

There was a lot of competition around package managers back then. For RPM, there were also urpmi, apt-rpm, etc.

First impressions really matter. This is also why I went Debian. You shouldn't be getting marked down for saying it.

Many of us were running on 28.8 dial-up. Internet search was not even close to a solved problem. Compiling a new kernel was an overnight or even weekend process. Finding and manually downloading rpm dependencies was slow and hard. Same era when compiling a kernel went overnight or over the weekend. You didn't download an ISO you bought a CD or soon a DVD that you could booted off of.

Compare that to Debian's apt-get or Suse's yast/yast2 of the time, both just handled all that for you.

Debian and Suse were fun and fit perfectly into the Web 1.0 world; RedHat was corporate. SystemD was pushed by RedHat.

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.

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.

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).

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