[ Please don't Cc: public replies to me. ] I'd like to join this discussion for a brief moment, if I may, even if my own opinion is rather fixed already. Ease-of-use is good, whether you define it as ease-of-learning, ease-of-getting-things-done, ease-of-installation, ease-of-system- administration, or any combination. I doubt anyone disagrees with this. However, technical quality is, I think, more important for Debian. That is: it is more important that things work correctly and securely than that things are easy to use. While I have several subjective reasons for this, I offer the following as an objective one: Debian has relatively little total man-power for development[1], and the man-power can be used more efficiently if things work. Thus, it's better to do the technically Right Thing, since then less man-power needs to be used later to fix things. Ease-of-use will be improved after we get things to work. Whether it is a graphical installation system or something else, it will get done when there are enough idle, interested developers available. It is good to suggest things that may need to be done, so idle developers, if any, will have something to be interested in. However, suggestions should be made politely. "Do not meddle in the affairs of Debian developers, for they are subtle and quick to anger", as the saying goes. If the volunteers who develop Debian do not become interested in doing something, pushing the issue won't help. Fact-based, polite, intelligent and brief discussions, filled with concrete suggestions, are always welcome, of course. Given the available amount of man-power, Debian needs to concentrate on system administration issues, rather than end-user issues (leaving end-user issues to Gnome, KDE, and other projects). I agree with Manoj that we have done that, and offer as proof my experience of administering about eight systems running Debian 1.3.1 over the past year. I have spent about two working days per system on system administration related to Debian, i.e., tasks such as initial installation, bug fixes, investigating problems caused by Debian, etc; not counting reading log files every day, arranging backups, etc.[2] If Debian was bad from a system administration point of view, I wouldn't get any real work done. Debian system administration still requires one to understand how a Unix system in general works on a high level (the various sub-systems and their interactions), and any configuration not done with the Debian-provided setup tools (e.g., smailconfig) requires one to understand and edit arcane text files. A typical home-user of Debian, whose system administration needs are very simple, would benefit if we could hide some more of his common tasks behind easier tools. It would even be nice to have all of our tools use a common user interface. This will happen, even if it happens slowly, and the only way to make it happen faster is to do it oneself. These days, I'm also unimpressed by complaints about Linux being too hard to learn or install. Earlier this year I had a discussion with a blind Linux user, and he told me, among other things, this: Taking the plunge into linux takes quite some time and, in my case, much effort as there is no sufficiently knowledgable person around to help dealing with braille-specific issues. For the more and this was really bad, before getty runs I had to do all installation without screen output. No boot disk ever sends its output to a com port so I couldn't follow the boot prompts. I had to find out about the exact boot procedures via text files on the net and via newsgroups (using a unix terminal account at my provider's) and then remember each event in sequence using a tape recorder. Fdisk was a hard one, as was everything that followed (up to finally creating a working gettying system). It took me more than two years but now I'm actually really proud to have made it this far. I don't ridicule anyone who has problems when encountering problems too difficult for his level of expertise, but I do prefer to help people willing to help themselves -- and I admire people like my blind correspondent who manage to get things done despite everything being against them. Lars, who is, probably, not going to participate further on this topic, to avoid being subtle. [1] Even with hundreds of developers, the total amount of man-power is fairly small, since most developers only maintain a couple of packages, and do not wish to spend a lot of time on Debian. [2] I've been called a liar by a person administering Windows machines, when citing this figure. :-) (It helps that my users haven't required constant updates of software, so our systems have been almost unchanged for a year.)
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