But at the last minute, some bugs were found. Rather than issuing buggy software and fixing it with dribbleware, Debian delayed rollout by a week, blowing off the party and the potential publicity of the Linuxworld Expo. That week-delayed Debian 2.1 was rock solid. John is the first to admit that Debian isn't for the raw newbie. But it also isn't as brain straining as some media would have us believe.
Packages are in the form of .deb files.
Both dselect and apt work by calling dpkg. He chose Debian because of its quality and stability. Once involved with Debian, he began reading the writings of Richard Stallman, and became committed to Free Software. Most of us want to try Debian to be Copyleft Correct. When you're installing a few thousand machines and don't want license tracking hassles, that's a mighty powerful argument.