Wouter Verhelst schreef op 22-10-2016 10:12:
A lay user may find Debian is best used if they have someone nearby who can help them sort out any problems. We can hope that the are minor and we try to remove, where possible, barriers to fixing them.I agree with the general gist of what you wrote. However, Bart does not seem to agree. I think that claiming that "Debian is not for lay users", and acting in that manner, makes us elitist, and that that is wrong. Even if that happens without our intending to do so, I *still* think that would make us elitist and wrong. Therefore, I want to understand why people think that "Debian is not for lay users", so that at the least we can try to fix the problem.
Would you say that a C compiler is for lay users? What about an oscilloscope?What about a soldering machine for electronics? What about an EEPROM programmer? What about anything that requires some technical expertise? I mean, who are you trying to fool, you know. Don't ask people to fix their motherboards with EEPROM programmers if they are not computer people. Do it for them. It is fine if you have a technical "expert" nearby who can help you with your problems but that still doesn't mean Debian would be for "lay" users. You can't honestly say that some advanced analyzer scope is for lay users as long as they have an expert nearby to help them use it.
I don't think it is elitist at all. You just have to be realistic. I have had fellow IT students who had a hard time using Linux. Or that knew nothing about it and also weren't much interested when what I knew was barely anything and I still knew a lot more than them. Debian can't suddenly become what it is not and when you take all people out of it there are no elitists anymore anywhere but Debian will still be what it is today which is a product. And the product is something IT people use and not small children or toddlers or girls who want to make Instagram pictures.
You shouldn't try to turn a cat into a dog and a soldering iron is not a hammer. Don't try to turn the soldering iron into a hammer, it's not a hammer. Debian is not for everyone. Chocolate is also not for everyone. Don't start some effort to turn everyone to chocolate. And then exclaim that when someone says "Just not everyone likes chocolate" and you call it "elitist" or "defeatist". Why /should/ everyone like chocolate? Why /should/ everyone use Debian? There's not point to it. Let it be what it is you know. Ubuntu does a better job at making it user friendly and even they are not doing a great job from my perspective.
I am trying to avoid chaos that results from extraneous goals that do not fit the Debian model. For Ubuntu user-friendliness is a core goal and for Debian it isn't. Let each be what it is and be good at what it does. You don't have to fill every niche and you can be happy about what you are today because Debian is the best minimalist distribution there is today in my opinion that does an excellent job at staying sane for the most part and that has very little to it that makes you irk because it doesn't state such high and lofty goals such as being for everyone everywhere all the time. This creates sanity and the word that comes to mind is Occam's razor. Debian is like the minimal solution to every problem. Or in other words "Keep it simple, stupid".