Back to RedHat
I'm sorry to say it guys, but after playing with Debian/Alpha for a week,
I'm terribly unhappy with it. I think the amount of work I'd have to put
into Debian would be much greater than that for RedHat, and it's too bad,
I'm not fond of RedHat, but I already know how to fix their hacks. I need to
get some work done on this machine, and can't tinker with it forever! ;)
Here are a couple of general suggestions that I'd like to see in some
distribution...some day...
1) Few (if any) trick/slick/pain-in-the-ass scripting thingies that try to
make life "easier". I spend an inordinate amount of time looking through
little scripts written to go along with distributions to figure out what
they do, so I can undo it. And then when you remember one of those scripts
and need to run it, you have no idea where it got run or how it was called.
(i.e. configuring keyboard -- my keyboard went all goofy like it was
remapped or something, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to
fix it, or how to bring up that dialog box in the installation that chose
the keyboard, or what that script did to select the keyboard) Other things
in this category are /etc/alternatives, moving X11 config to /etc/X11,
window manager menu structures (hook?)
2) Few (if any) duplicate functionality packages. For instance, Debian
comes with like 7 mail-delivery-agents. What's with that? To a new user,
it's not clear which is best, and at times, even that you can only choose
*one*. Also, there are 3 different mutually exclusive ways to install the
gtk libs. (???)
3) Whittle down the number of packages. At last count the main tree had
1713 packages in it. It takes many hours to sift through that list and
decide what to install. And after doing so, you simply can't remember all
the "neato" little things you installed. I saw mention recently of trying
to keep up with the intel side of .deb's. Forget about it. Their community
is much larger and they will always churn out new stuff faster than us. Go
for a smaller set of stable packages instead of the latest whiz-bang stuff.
4) Get rid of beta software! This includes WindowMaker, Gnome, etc.
5) In order to help users see and play with the software on their system,
set up some kind of way to automagically add installed software to window
manager menus so they can run it. (*all* window managers...)
6) dselect needs a major overhaul. Its key mappings are non-intuitive and
conflict with other popular packages (i.e. '-' going back a page in more,
and the + key turns into the * symbol, while all other keys match symbols).
It doesn't show you that a package has dependencies until after you try to
install it (which takes time, and is distracting to switch screens). Show
(unresolved) dependencies on the same screen that is used to select
packages. The way it constantly brings up the help screen is a *major*
pain. How about a mode to look at *only* what is currently installed, so
that you can remove things?
-- Bob
./'^`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'#`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'^`\.
/ Rube Goldberg? Bah! Amateur! I give you..Windows 98! Linux everywhere \
| Linux, because everyone's work is mission critical. ANYTHING inside. |
|_Bob McElrath (mcelrath@wisconsin.cern.ch) Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison_|
\.___________________________________________________________________./
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