Are Debian and derivates the best linux options given the number of available packages?

Are Debian and derivates the best linux options given the number of available packages?

sticky

Bump.

Gentoo is better for low-level ricing, Alpine is better for true minimalism, Slackware is better for something unixish, etcetera. Debian and derivatives are not always the best option.

But they're pretty good overall. *buntus are usually the best for something easy to use, and Debian is very flexible. It can cover your needs if you want stable, rolling release, FSF+-tier freedom, Steam, systemd, sysvinit, kFreeBSD, weird processor architectures, or most other things you could think of.

just use bsd

Debian and RedHat are the only game in town for industrial tier Linux distributions. The rest of the distro space is largely faggotry.

Only if number of available packages is your criterion for deciding what are the best Linux options.

A distro without port system isn't worth it.

Windows is the only game in town for industrial tier OS. The rest of the OS space is largely faggotry.

Debian would be perfect if they weren't so fixated on not activating security compilation flags in their packages.

borked softwareless distro?

you don't need your shitty software

Sorry my noob, but what is port system?

Ready made pre-cooked packages, yes. Best linux option for many other things, no.

Like which things, specifically?

Being a memer on Holla Forums, for once.

If the measure is by the number of packages, or maintained packages then Yes is the answer

Package size != quality of distro.


A port system is a source based retrieval and build system, rather then a binary based installed system. A port system will allow more customizability for its packages (usually through preprocessor options and patches). A binary based system is "one size fits all", but will install packages faster since they are already built.
I won't advocate ports system for anyone except those who get sick of dependency bloat.

No. If your criteria is most available packages, Gentoo is your best bet. Source-based distros always have the best package selections because packages don't have to be rebuilt upstream for updates, usually it's just bumping a version number and reinstalling.

.deb distros are your best options for available built packages, though. Every notable software provides a .deb for you to use.

By that definition Debian has a port system. The standard way of installing packages is through pre-built binaries, but with apt-build you can build all your packages locally with custom flags.

That's not even the best part. The best part of a port system is the fact that you can mix a bleeding-edge and stable system without running into dependency or linker issues (as everything is linked on your side). My system is mostly stable, but I have bleeding-edge for things like web browsers and compilers (where I really want the latest features, stability, and security rather than an ancient but battle-tested version).

Use flags are a bonus, but I never took them to be the main reason you'd want to use the system. Firefox alone is a total 131M on my system. I'm not really betting on the boons of saving space from a 2M library.

This.

Is Javascript the best server-side programming language given the number of available packages?

GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux are more appropriate terms here.

GTFO

Irrelevant