On 11 Dec 2004, at 11:16 pm, Josselin Mouette wrote:
Le samedi 11 décembre 2004 à 23:12 +0000, Tim Cutts a écrit :If Debian tries to be too rigid, we run a serious risk of consigningourselves to history, because people just won't install Debian any moreif it doesn't work out-of-the-box on most hardware - and the time is pretty much already here that most systems contain at least one component that loads firmware from disk every boot."Most systems" ? Come on.
I don't think it's the case today, but I think that it will be soon. It's the way the world is going.
Furthermore, compromising our ideals just to run on more hardware is nota good idea. When there are technical solutions to run Debian on this hardware without such a compromise, this becomes completely stupid.
But they are technical solutions that cause a great deal of effort for the user, and like meeting people, meeting a new distribution is very much a matter of first impressions counting. If the new user, especially a relatively non-computer-savvy one, finds that their shiny new Debian install doesn't work on their network card, they'll just try again with a different distro, or go back to Windows.
I don't know what the answer is here, but I think this problem is likely to get more acute, and could seriously degrade Debian's ease of use -- which is already not something it has a fantastic reputation for -- and thereby its popularity.
Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts GPG: 1024/D FC81E159 5BA6 8CD4 2C57 9824 6638 C066 16E2 F4F5 FC81 E159
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