rpm or deb?

[BillieJean]

well i'm not a newbie since i've use linux for 1 year.

i have tried all the *ubuntus (xubuntu, ubuntu, kubuntu), debian etch, mandriva 2007, fedora and many more.

after some extended usage i find kde my favourite and now i'm thinking about switching to another distro. currently i'm on kubuntu feisty but i tried the mandriva spring kde live cd and it looks quite sexy. but the true reason why i find mandriva interesting is that it's supported by PLF and has much software included by itself.

but on the other side, i like the simplicity of debian based distro's.

so, can anyone recommend, what's a better choice? is rpm really superior to deb? is that going to change in the near future?

please reply.

[Gtrax]

The Ubuntus have a slick install where about the hardest thing you need to get right is selecting a keyboard and timezone.
I used Mepis6.0 because it used the Ubuntu engine, but with a much easier access to the drivers etc. that I wanted. Even then, the way the set of available software is locked to a particular Ubuntu version release meant that repositories other than default would go splat very easily. So - like you, I went to the joys of the Debian, even if it was harder work sticking together a good set of applications, and weeding the KDE menu.

Mepis 7 is now back to the Debian OK - so what about RPMs??
It seems its no problem. 'rpm' is itself a package that can be installed into Debian based systems via apt-get or Synaptic. Indeed, it seems to be present by default in most distros, and is invoked by things like KDE's 'Kpackage', even if you are running Debian. As a test, get up a terminal (like Konsole), become root using 'su' and offer the password, and then type 'rpm' and see if it replies with the usage instructions.

Generally, with any of the distros, you can have it all. 'rpm' is of course the default with Fedora, and I just do not know if using the "wrong" package installer for the distro would end up putting bits of the package into differently chosen directories, but I don't think so.

[techieMoe]

well i'm not a newbie since i've use linux for 1 year.

so, can anyone recommend, what's a better choice? is rpm really superior to deb? is that going to change in the near future?

please reply.

If you've used Linux for a while, you'll understand when I say "better choice" is completely subjective. There are thousands of choices out there and you've only scratched the surface with the first dozen or so. I've tried roughly 100 distributions (and different versions of the same distribution) and all of them have their strong points.

RPM and DEB, in my personal end-user experience, are equal. Thanks to tools like yum, RPM can be just as easy to manage as apt-get, and neither package format has given me any trouble. It's really just personal preference, like anything else in the Linux world.