Re: Nomination question: Redhat
> > How to grow market numbers like Redhat has?
>
> We do not have the money to do lots of marketing like RH does, so we have a
> drawback. We do have a distribution that is technically superior and a very
> good reputation though, which attracts a lot of new users. Our social
> contract and the DFSG are a factor in that. Another thing that will help us
> making Debian easier available to a larger public. This means two things:
> making installation still easier, and trying to increase our shelf precense.
> Currently there is only one Debian book (written by Dale Scheetz) out there,
> but it looks like that may change in the next year.
>
Hi,
Maybe I should not speak here as I'm rather new on this list, but felt I
should share my first experiences with Linux and why I've chose Debian
against RedHat.
Needless to say, the first thing that I have try was RedHat. Everybody
talks about RedHat, you see it in the computer magazines, to your
friends computers, at the faculty. Debian is usually after RedHat.
As I didn't have money to pay for RedHat CD (or any other Linux distro),
but have had a Win95 with a CD Writer and an internet connection at the
faculty, I have downloaded the RedHat and burn a Joilet CD. The RedHat
didn't install from the CD and I was forced to copy it on the HDD. It
was full of bugs. I was trying to install it home where I didn't have an
Internet connection to download the patches. (I've try then Slackware,
but this didn't install either from Joilet CD. There were also far too
few packages in slack.)
Very disappointed I've started to browse the net for distros with ready
made CD images. Debian was the only one. Burning my bo CDs was a
painless process and it installed very well and easy enough. The first
encounter with dselect was painfully, but now, after almost a year I'm
starting to get used with it :-) Even though it was harder to use at the
beginning, dselect gave me much more options than the Tk/Tcl stuff from
RedHat. And that bo (r8 I suppose) have had by far less bugs than RH.
And almost everything I wanted was on my CDs (it was later that I have
discovered that there was a non-free section with no CD image for
download.)
These 3 things (CD images, good installer / uninstaller and less bugs)
are some very good things which can attract MSWin$$ users.
I've read on this thread there we are all in the free software world and
there is no competition. There is competition. And as this is a "gift
society", the winner is that one which gives the greatest gift to the
others. And you can also loose the game: visiting the SAL (Scientific
Applications on Linux) http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM/ you find a lot of
packages which are stalled (dead). This can happen when you loose. I was
once a Borland C++ Builder user. I was always afraid Borland will be
defeated by MS and I will be forced to switch to something else like
VC++. Seeing so many RH PCs around me comparing with debian, I'm
sometimes afraid this can happen with Debian, too. It's the same old
story: lower quality products but with better advertisement own a bigger
the market share.
I will end this with just one question: browsing the www.debian.org for
most than 1/2 year, I was not been able to find a place to register
myself as a Debian user, though I would like to do that. Is there a
place like that ? Can you make one ? I suppose debian users will be
happy to register !
Please excuse for the noise :-)
Ionutz
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