Michael Whitman on Mon, 7 Jan 2002 20:10:23 +0100


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Re: [PLUG] And speaking of installing Debian ...


Is the new woody installer any more friendly?

At 01:25 PM 1/7/2002 -0500, you wrote:
Anybody else seen this? From today's  Lockergnome Pensguin Shell newsletter
..
(http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/penguinshell.html)
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After six teeth-gnashing hours, a single clear question struck me. "Who am I
writing this review for, anyway?" The answer, in part, determined the course
of the remaining weekend. New Linux Users. Is Debian a distribution that's
friendly to New Linux Users? My experience, obviously, says no. While I'll
certainly welcome any solutions from Deb users, I can't, in good conscience,
point someone who's just making the transition to Linux toward Deb. Heck,
I'll even invite the raves of the Deb hardcore. It's all part of the open
source discourse. I'll gladly and freely admit that the problem was
hardware, not directly the distribution. In the end, though, the effort
itself really wrote the review.

Ultimately, there's no need today for a distribution to be this tough. Over
the course of this review, I've seen Mandrake, Suse, TurboLinux, SlackWare,
and, this week, RedHat. Even Slack, renowned as being a bit temperamental
for new users, installed comparatively easily. There's simply no reason to
incur this level of install torture. Deb users say often that Deb is the
purest, most powerful version of Linux. I won't question that. But if the
overall goal of moving to new users to Linux is best accomplished by
minimizing the legendary Linux headaches, I'm all for simplification. I
happen to think that's the key and that the effort to reach that goal is far
outweighed by the benefit.





--
Goodbye youth, goodbye dreams,
The good times and the friends I used to know.
Goodbye freedom, hello fear,
A brave new world has suddenly appeared.
                          "Salvation Road", The Kinks


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