I too am quite familiar with the 'apt decides to remove large chunks of userland' problem, as well as 'so-and-so depends on libso-and-so, but it is too cool to be installed'. And any changes to GNOME invariably come at the cost of having to use terrifying fonts from the past, until you figure out what apt forgot to install (xfs?)
I like Rosegarden, although the UI widgets look disturbingly like early AWT or something. /dev/sequencer is where it expects to find your MIDI device (I don't have one, but I managed to persuade it to use an ALSA software sequencer in the end). Frankly though, I put this under the heading of 'ultimately not worth the hassle of getting to run'.
I think Debian is widely perceived as being rather backward (they might prefer the term 'conservative') but I still like apt (I'm old enough to remember the horror of trying to use RPMs without a dependency resolution system like yum, or for that matter trying to build things from source, which is a real good way to shorten your telomeres) and I like their ethical policy. The installer is frankly terrible, but that's no problem: I use a cheerful front end like Knoppix or Ubuntu to get a foothold on the box, then switch to the Debian repositories and dist-upgrade.
So I think overall Debian sucks slightly less, as long as you don't try to upgrade it...
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I too am quite familiar with the 'apt decides to remove large chunks of userland' problem, as well as 'so-and-so depends on libso-and-so, but it is too cool to be installed'. And any changes to GNOME invariably come at the cost of having to use terrifying fonts from the past, until you figure out what apt forgot to install (xfs?)
I like Rosegarden, although the UI widgets look disturbingly like early AWT or something. /dev/sequencer is where it expects to find your MIDI device (I don't have one, but I managed to persuade it to use an ALSA software sequencer in the end). Frankly though, I put this under the heading of 'ultimately not worth the hassle of getting to run'.
I think Debian is widely perceived as being rather backward (they might prefer the term 'conservative') but I still like apt (I'm old enough to remember the horror of trying to use RPMs without a dependency resolution system like yum, or for that matter trying to build things from source, which is a real good way to shorten your telomeres) and I like their ethical policy. The installer is frankly terrible, but that's no problem: I use a cheerful front end like Knoppix or Ubuntu to get a foothold on the box, then switch to the Debian repositories and dist-upgrade.
So I think overall Debian sucks slightly less, as long as you don't try to upgrade it...