Oliver Jones wrote:
Most people point out the benefits of apt when they talk about Debian. May I point out that Fedora by default now uses yum which is very similar to apt for package management. You can also install apt if you like. I use apt and synaptic for my own package management on Fedora Core 3.
While people talk about apt, it's not really apt thats the great thing. It's the ability to think "I want <foo>" and one command later it's installed. It doesn't matter what <foo> is, it's probably in debian somewhere. The package will be high quality, it will work out of the box to the point that it doesn't actually occur to you that it might not work. There will be manpages for every executable, (even if that man page says "the documentation is in /usr/share/doc/packagename/index.html"), debconf might ask you a few questions to help do basic setup of the package if you want to save you having to worry too much about whats going on. Since every piece of software on your box is probably in the package management system, you can be sure it will have security bugs fixed etc. While apt is a piece of the puzzle, it's the only concrete part of it that you can talk about. The repositorys have great coverage, only extremely obscure software won't be in debian. The debian policy means you get extremely high quality packages. Apt means that all of this is trivial to manage from a users PoV. Saying apt is what makes debian great is like saying flying makes aeroplanes great. While a paraglider does meet the requirement of flying, what's important is where you're going and how quickly you'll get there, flying is fun, and the obvious difference over a motorcar it's not the important part of why you are in a plane in the first place.