Re: Re: Would you agree - Debian is for the tech savvy

[Stephan Foley <foley12723@gmail.com>]

Hi Wouter and thanks for the reply.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> It is fair to say that Debian supports:
> - Non-technical desktop users who want to use one of:
>   - Gnome
>   - KDE
>   - Mate
>   - Cinnamon
>   - XFCE
>   - LXDE
> - non-technical users who want to run a web, print, or SSH server;
> - Technical users who want to use anything else
>
> since these are the "tasks" that are included in the installer, and
> which produce a full selection of packages.
>
> FluxBox is not one of those. If you want to use a user interface that
> isn't one of the standard environments, it's certainly possible to do so
> within Debian, but it *will* indeed require a lot more effort.
>
> However, going from there to saying that "Debian is only for the tech
> savvy sys admin type and the server market" is taking a bit of a leap
> that I'm not sure is a fair one. We do support less tech savvy people,
> just not with such highly customized environments.

Very true, I agree with all of your points. Going back to my original
purpose of posting this question, I wanted to do a sort of "sales
pitch" to encourage Debian to offer Fluxbox as a task in the
installer. I actually wrote up a spec which you can find here:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/FluxboxSpec

I had just watched a video about Debian development and the speaker
said the official motto might be the universal operating system, but
the unofficial motto is the sys admin distro for sys admins.

So, I thought this might be a good angle for my pitch...hey, Debian is
for the technically savvy, so why not offer a technically savvy
windows manager in addition to the others. As for the others (Gnome,
KDE, etc), I might add that they are mostly just aping the Windows
paradigm, but that might be my chauvinist Fluxbox attitude :-)

As for what I think, having used Debian for many years, I think Debian
is for the server market and also a major "feeder" for all the
downstream distros. I think that's where Debian derives power and
fills its niche very well.

Thanks again for the reply. Also...let's get Fluxbox in the
installer's tasks list! All those server admins deserve an easy
install :-)

Steve