Re: No good user experience of Debian (Was: Packaging r-bioc-simpleaffy)

[Tony Travis <ajt@minke.ukfsn.org>]

On 28/02/11 22:59, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Tony,
>
> I would like to discuss this topic in a separate thread on
> debian-project where it might belong to.

Hi, Andreas.

OK, the topic is now closed on Debian-Med.

> [...]   I simply wanted to share some negative user experience in
> contrast to several good critics on debian-project list.  For the
> readers here:  I highly regard Tony's opinion.  Please do not start
> a flamewar about his opinion.]

I don't want to start an advocacy debate about Debian vs. Ubuntu, 
because that has been done to death elsewhere. My objective is to win 
the hearts and minds of biologists using M$ Windows to run Bio-Linux, 
the current version of which is based on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Together with my colleagues, I arranged a biologist's 'power' user 
workshop in Florence during which we spent one of the three days in a 
University computer lab set up entirely with Debian Etch workstations 
running Iceweasel, to connect as NX clients to NuGO-Linux servers.

  http://nbx.nugo.org

It was not my idea to use Debian clients. It was a facility offered to 
us by the University of Florence and I was happy to accept the offer. I 
did not anticipate the problems that we encountered doing something as 
simple as running an NX client. The session was a complete disaster 
until we rapidly installed the non-free Sun Java and browser plugin.

First off, our NuGO servers use the NX 'helper' applet that did not work 
with gcj and IcedTea, to load a native NX client. Then as part of the 
excercise we wanted to run Adobe reader. These things are trivial to do 
under M$ Windows and I found myself unable to convince anyone that it 
was a good idea to run Linux on the client-side. Needless to say, this 
all worked perfectly from my Bio-Linux (Ubuntu) laptop.

I used Debian on SPARC and x86/x86_64 on workstations and servers long 
before Ubuntu was released, and I'm well aware that Ubuntu is nothing 
without Debian. However, my own experience of non-expert users being 
introduced to Debian for the first time is a lot less satisfactory than 
when they are introduced to Ubuntu. I'm not in any way detracting from 
the huge achievements of Debian. I'm just saying that I found it easier 
to convince sceptical M$ Windows users to run an NX client on their own 
machine to access an Ubuntu server, or run Ubuntu on their own machine 
than I did to convince them to use Debian for any purpose.

As Andreas said, this is not flame-bait - It's just my opinion, and I've 
posted a message here on debian-project because he asked me to.

Bye,

  Tony.