Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 02:54:17PM -0800, Philip Brown wrote:
> In some senses, debian was the ORIGINAL "make it easy on the user"
> linux distribution. That was one of the major things that set it apart,
> through the magic of apt-get.
>
> The concept of easy upgrades, coupled with reliable results, made it a win
> for an end-user experience.
>
> Now the basic standard of "end user experience" has been raised. Now
> not only does it have to be easy to install, AND things to work together,
> but they expect them to look nice, be easy to use at the application level,
> etc.
[ snip weird shoot-em-up analogy ]
> I'm glad the desktop group is trying to address the issue. But it seems
> like the attitudes of debian developers in general need a serious
> adjustment.
Debian is, and always has been, user-friendly. It's just picky about
who its users are.
<groan>
Seriously, I have always considered Debian the premiere distribution for
when you "just want things to work". Examples include servers, and
development platforms. I'm sure there are more examples. If I am serving
up a couple hundred thousand web pages per day/hour/whatever, or
developing software (perhaps *gasp* even commercial software!!! oh, the
horror) the last thing I need or want is a flaky operating system that
makes me hold it over my shoulder and pat it on the back until it burps
every day. I just don't have the time.
Thank you, Debian developers, for creating, maintaining, and extending
a system that _works_.
Did I mention how cool it is to have a wintel box and a sparc on my
desktop, and they both run Debian? Makes what few admin tasks
there are go that much faster. It makes my life _easy_; that's what
software is supposed to do, or so I've been lead to believe.
Cheers,
--
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his
neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist,
and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
-- Will Durant
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