The linux mascot Xenia is such a big deal for me because
1) shes trans
2) she's a fox
3) she's into Linux
I am
1) trans
2) a fox
3) into Linux
@fatedfox @renbymon @dh I got #MyFirstLinux on a magazine cover. Mandrake Linux sounded good because it was optimized for Pentiums! Then I found the pain of installing RPMs before yum was a thing, and switched to #Debian.
@fatedfox @renbymon @dh It was dependency management that did it for me. As I recall, installing a package consisted of downloading it, then telling rpm to install it and then being told what packages that required, so you'd download those and try again. And again. And again.
Dpkg, on the other hand, seems to have always been paired with dselect or apt to do the legwork for you.
@renbymon @darac @dh I don't recall ever having a problem with rpm, or the early days of dpkg when Leonerd introduced me to Debian :) Debian did win out for me in the end, it was just more organically intuitive to me, and remains so! (Although my linux interactions now are fairly limited - Y'all run rings around me!)