When I ran Redhat, I was constantly irriated by having to find packages and installing them manually. Debian was great because I no longer hand to go and find all the stuff I needed, and keep it up to date with respect to security fixes.
To a certain extent Fedora is making this better. With a select few yum/apt repositories you get the same effect. Obviously if there is no repository for an app then it can be more involved to install. Fedora certainly doesn't have the depth of apps that debian enjoys yet. But this is purely a community size thing. The more people who join the Fedora (and related) packaging efforts the more packages there will be.
People say that Linux has a "dependancy hell" of trying to find the dependancies/versions for software that you want to install. These people must be running slackware or fedora where you don't have the huge package base to install from. In Debian if I needed to install the Redland RDF Parser, apt-get would install it, and all of it's dependancies, and then if a security flaw is found, it will be updated. Under Redhat (and now Fedora), anything extra I have to find and manage myself.
Not entirely true anymore. But the more off the beaten track you go this still tends to be the case. It's pretty rare now days that I go looking too far afield for apps I want on my desktop. Fedora is pretty young and I hope that as time goes by more people will create more domain specific yum/apt repositories for Fedora that plug in to the main Fedora Core and Fedora Extras repositories and don't overlap with other 3rd part repositories. A good example of this is the one at rpm.livna.org which provides most of your DVD/Media watching package requirements. One of the more irritating things I find is the general lack of willingness from app developers to plug into common distributions in a sane fashion. The quality of rpm packaging by software developers leaves something to be desired in many cases.
Debian is the only distribution that spans multiple architectures with almost every conceivable piece of software. There are almost no distributions that deal with non x86.
While this is great and commendable. 99% of people who run Linux use x86. The only real alternative to x86 for servers is PPC (Mac/IBM pSeries) or IBM System 390's. And if you're gonna run a Mac then just Run MacOS X. It's BSD it can do most things your Linux box can. And if you're going to spend all that money to buy an UltraSparc you should be forced to run Solaris as penance. ;) The only other reason to run on some other esoteric platform is that you're collecting old and slow computers out of interest or you're trying to add a new lease of life to your dilapidated SGI O2 that's now just running the printers. ;) Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver.jones(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com