Re: Iggdrasil, a new amazing screenreader

[Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer@gmail.com>]

Wi-Fi can be a bit finicky, both with ensuring you have the right
driver and configuration(there really ought to be a script that scans
for available access points, presents a menu of the detected access
points, and prompts for apassword if needed instead of having to
either bake wi-fi networks into one's wpa_supplicant file or using one
tool to scan and then another to connect that you have to type the
name precisely as the scan reported without the benefit of tab
completion), but ethernet should just work and never need
configuration, even when switching between different Ethernet access
points unless you get a bit overeager trimming a system down
post-install.

And while part of me agrees that having things pre-installed and
already configured is a big part of accessibility, both in the "blind
people can use this" and "easy to use" senses of the word, I do think
it worth mentioning that the Debian Unstable repositories contain over
63,000 packages, and that's not including the contrib and non-free
repositories. Stable might have a little less, and over 11,000 of
those 63,000 are in the lib and libdevel categories their are plenty
of libs elsewhere in the repositories, and modularity means an
application might be spread out over many packages(the version of
Firefox I'm running depends on 32 packages, most of which probably
have dependencies of their own), so the true number of available apps
is much lower than the total number of packages, but there's only so
much that can fit on a single CD/DVD, and only so many options a net
installer can offer without overwhelming all but the most particular
users, and its hard to hit that sweet spot where the installed system
is lean but doesn't require manual configuration of basic things and
is full-featured without being bloated with many packages most users
will never use.

Admittedly, "Just works" configuration of a computer's internet
connection seems pretty darn basic, especially if you're using the net
installer... but at the same time, the base system requiring manual
configuration doesn't seem unreasonable and while it's been a while
since I've done a clean install of vanilla Debian, I could imagine it
being easier than it should be to miss whatever handles
autoconfiguration of the network if you don't accept the defaults at
the install additional packages step(which is probably most console
users since I believe the default includes whichever Desktop came on
your install disc(if using one of the variants of Debian CD1) or
whichever desktop is Debian's default(if using the net installer or
the DVD), especially since I recall some of the non-desktop options on
the list of package bundles to install not being that
self-explanatory.