Debian is light?
 

I have been hear that some people always said that running Debian is more faster (light) compare to another distro like RH & Mandrake. So I want to know is that fact is true. One more...what is the best benifit to use Debian compare to another distro like RH, Mandrake, Suse etc. TQ

Well, this is deceiving as any distro can be customized to your needs. Depending on what services you run, what window manager or desktop you run all plays a role...
I'm sure a highly customized Redhat machine can be just as fast as any Debian machine.. and vice versa..

It depends on your configuration. The fact is that in Debian it's easier to install less packages than in RH or Mandrake. It just allows you to do more at the installation stage. But after installation you can do everything with your system...

Well, let me just say that rather than make a sweeping statement that Debian is light, let me just say that Debian is flexible. The particular Debian GNU/Linux implementation that I use, Libranet, seems to be one of the most optimized distros other than the ones that are compiled and built from scratch.

Debian is so easy to modify. You can add, remove, upgrade, downgrade, live on the bleeding edge, or live on the old, stable edge, or anywhere in between as much as you want. I particularly like Libranet because it is easy to install, yet so configurable.

I do find Libranet to be one of the fastest booting distros that I use, and I rarely find anything that doesn't work unless I download something from the unstable Debian branch.

All of the above statements are true.

I've found that the Debian installer, tends to lead you toward building a "light" system by default, this contrasts with RH, Mandrake, SuSe, etc, that tend to lead you to build a system preconfigured to do everything. This is nice, but can really slow things down.

My Debian box does boot up very fast, however, everything it does, I've had to manually configure to do myself.

And on of the big differences i have discovered between debian and mandrake, is that mandrake uses alot of special scripts on the system, so if you want to edt something by hand it can often be hard time. And for some reason debian feels more stable even though i'm running sid (unstable), i have done that for 4 month now, and the only crash i have had was my own faults. When i used mandrake 8.1 & 8.2 i had several X-crashes.

I'm using many distros, Mandrake is on 2 machines. One was installed more than a year ago and not a single crash. The other one is a machine for experiments (last install 2 months ago because of a new disk) and it's the same. Both reconfigured by me, so maybe that's why they're so stable... I don't know.

What you say does tend to be true, Debian systems do not start up (by default) nearly as many services, nor do they generally configure their kernel to run every possible incantation or include every includable module.

At least one Debian distro I know of, Libranet, a fine distro from British Columbia, Canada, simplifies some of the Debian install and configuration issues. I highly recommend it.

Regarding "light" or "heavy", any distribution can be set up in any fashion that you desire. Some of the commercial distros tend to set up more things by default, whereas Debian distros tend to let you add things in as you need them. It's really not a question of which is better, it is a question of which approach best meets your needs.

All of them are getting better about managing dependencies; this has been a long term Debian strength, for what it's worth.