:<

On the one hand, it's super-up-to-date.

On the other, it's got all the rancidness of Red Hat coupled with the slowness of Yum and a very incomplete apt toolset.

It does have a lovely installer and it does get you up and running with a minimum of fuss, but I found it frustrating really quickly; the centralised QA that means that Debian releases are really slow isn't there, meaning packages can and do act more-or-less just as they please; there's no sane way of dealing with orphaned packages (packages which have nothing depending on them - libraries, usually); Yum (the Yellow Dog Updater, Modified) is a nice tool but it's REALLY slow.

I've tried, in the past year, Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 & 2, SuSE 9.0, Mandrake 9.0, and the one I always go back to because it's just better is Debian. Better QA, better architecture, better documentation, better packages, better policy, better software selection.

BETTER