Who is a Debian user?
Everyone who uses Debian is a Debian user, of course. But what does a Debian
user do with his Debian box or his Debian account? There seems to be lots of
confusion about this. Some people seem to think that a user only reads his
email, write documents and surf the web. No user would ever, ever want to do
anything else. Right?
Let me tell me what I do for a living. I am not an administrator. I am a
user. I do not have the root password. I develop business software in Java
under Windows NT, and this involves a lot of distributed programming. Our
program communicates with other programs on the intranets at different
customer sites or across the internet between our customers and their
partners. When our customers experience communication problems with our
software, they contact support, and if support is not able to help them,
they often come to me. And I try to help them, on the phone usually. Ask
them to try this and try that. Often I ask them to run ipconfig (ifconfig in
Linux) or tracert (traceroute in Linux). With the information they give me I
can usually help them. Neither of us are superusers. Still, I see a need for
both me and the users that call me to occasionally to run these commands. To
me this PROVES that diagnostic network commands are useful for even the most
common users. And in this case, I am sorry to say, I am glad they use NT. It
makes my life easier. I can help them faster and go back to coding faster.
But it also makes me sad, because why should such a thing be easier in
Windows than in Debian? It is so easy to change. The attitude against users
is the only difference.
I have to come to ask myself: who is Debian for? Is there a vision that
Debian someday will be used by more or less anyone? Or should it only run
webservers and occassionally administrator desktops?
Will Debian continue to maintain barriers between superuser territory and
"the rest", even when it just comes to looking? I often get this feeling
when I browse the mailing list archives that there is this elite-thinking
that if you do not know the root password you should simply stay away from
exploring superuser territory. Do not dare to explore the network
interfaces. You must not know your IP addresses. Call the adminstrators
instead. Probably they will tell you that they are too busy to come this
week, but do not fix it yourself. You do not have the root password.
I know that Debian is for Debian developers. Ok, fine. But should it end
with that? If Debian is to make inroads to corporate environments,
especially desktops, this attitude will have to change. I like much of
Debian. The social contract, software in the public interest, good quality
software. But then this attitude against users. It confuses me.
Claes
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