On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 02:25:48PM -0500, David Zoll wrote:
>
>
> Peter Hugosson-Miller wrote:
> [snip]
> > Sarcasm noted. What you really mean is "Debian is not for newbies".
> > Well we all know that. I happen to have discovered that this might no
> > longer be the case...
>
> Debian is very much for newbies, I've set up a friend with Debian &
> Helix GNOME, and he really likes it.
>
> What isn't for newbies is administering a computer connected to the
> internet. The issues involved in minimizing the risk of:
completely agreed.
> * losing things important to you; and
> * someone using your machine to do something bad with your
> fingerprints all over it
> are too complicated for someone who hasn't put significant time into
> learning how their computer and the internet work. This is true whether
> the machine is running Debian, Red Hat, Corel or even Windows or MacOS.
indeed.
> Newbies who want to use the internet need a friend to set up their
> machine well, and monitor it periodically to make sure things are up to
> date and nothing stupid has happened. If they don't have a friend, they
> should buy a support contract somewhere that covers the same things.
agreed, i run a machine for someone who does not know anything about
system administration, they don't even have the root password, and
wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. the situation would be the
same if the machine was W2K instead of Debian GNU/Linux.
> Ease of use features just make the life of this friend or support person
> easier, they don't bring the task into the realm of "Newbie safe".
> Worse, they sometimes encourage newbies to believe that things ARE safe.
ease of use features in system administration usually make life on
real admins HARDER, not easier. ("it looks like you edited that
config file yourself, let me throw away your changes and comments and
put it back the way i had it" --standard SuSE|RedHat|Mandrake|etc behavior)
as for these ease of use features making newbies do dangerous things,
completely agreed, see go-gnome thing.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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