Thread: Can you recommend a Linux version for beginner
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zimon is offline zimon
2012-05-13 , 13:31
Posts: 1,341 | Thanked: 708 times | Joined on Feb 2010
#73
Originally Posted by GrimyHR View Post
why?
because rpm is technically superior over deb.
There is many features missing in deb, which are in rpm and used by default. (for example deb's way of embedded signatures is not really used anywhere)

rpm has differential packages (.drpm) which leads to savings in data transfers both for end users and operators, and it saves time when updating and upgrading.

For example, I did a "yum -y update" to my Fedora 16 machine today:
Code:
....
Upgrade  8 Packages
....
Total download size: 5.7 M
Downloading Packages:
Setting up and reading Presto delta metadata
updates/prestodelta                                      | 1.1 MB     00:00
Processing delta metadata
Download delta size: 553 k
....
Finishing rebuild of rpms, from deltarpms
<locally rebuilding deltarpms>                           | 3.5 MB     00:03
Presto reduced the update size by 85% (from 3.5 M to 553 k).
....
Also rpm has transactions support, so if device looses battery power between installing packages, the device can itself backroll after reboot. (in fact, if battery power is lost in middle of transaction, nothing needs to be backrolled, only transaction continued and finished or transaction cancelled)

Additionally, rpm-systems has well built and tested support for SELinux. SElinux is quite difficult to build afterwards to the system, if software packages doesn't support it already.

And rpm packages have GPG-signatures embedded, so we won't have security vulnerabilities like in talk.maemo.org we see often: there is a MITM attack possible every time someone does wget+dpks_-i.
Last edited by zimon; 2012-05-13 at 13:46.