Re: Essential bloat [was: Debian on CDROM]
>
>For what it's worth, I'm still using computers which are more than five
>years old, and I imagine many other people are as well. Also, remember
>that we have a lot of potential users in places where newer equipment
>is not the norm, and where money is very tight.
>
5 years is a really long time in computer years. I am surprised that anyone
would willingly use hardware that old. Especially considering the "mean
time to failure" is ~2.5 years on most components. As far as availability
and expense, I can go to my local computer recylcer and buy a Pentium 133
system with a CD drive for less than 100 dollars U.S.
Servers do tend to have a much longer lifespan, but CD's became standard
issue on servers before workstations. Servers are generally running in IT
shops where there is a budget allocated for upgrades and repairs. I find it
hard to fathom that a shop is unable to afford a CD drive. And even if a
server lacks a CD drive, chances are pretty good its on a network and can
use NFS.
In comparison to the auto industry, no one expects the Ford dealer to stock
parts for a 56 Tbird. Why should anyone expect the boot-floppies group to
support installations solely from floppy when there are much better methods
readily available.
I'm looking forward to when floppy support is discontinued in lieu of
bootable CD's. This will remove the stifling constraints on the image
sizes. After that, you will just download an ISO image file and burn a CD
with it.
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