Re: An open letter to the debian community
David Blackman wrote:
>
> I love Debian, I use Debian, I administer Debian at my
> school. Why do I use Debian? Because my school uses it. Why does my
> school use it? Because they didn't like the GUIness of RedHat, and
> Slackware is just too much of a hassle. Plus, they were drawn to apt-get.
Yes, I like apt-get...
...
>
> Okay, I've just installed Debian/GNU Linux (Don't forget the GNU!), it
> only took me 3 hours to get through all those cryptic installation
> questions. now where's my full featured web browser?
> <Well, either you've got small broken browsers (arena, gozilla),
> or a broken version of Netscape called Mozilla.
Yes, I have downloade Mozilla, and it doesn't run (segfaulted).
I downloaded Netscape instead. The newsreader and mailreader not
included; well, I think it's still _much_ better than having to write
your own browser from scratch.
> Now, can I edit my MS Office docs?
> You might be able to look at them, but definitely not edit them!
> What about this StarOffice thing I keep hearing about? <
> That's a 50 meg download.
Have you ever try to download MS Office (for Windows)...? (if it is
downloadable at all.)
...
> No, we don't include the sound modules, you'll need to
> recompile the kernel by hand.
Compiling kernel is not that difficult; "make menuconfig" and then "make
zImage".
...
> And my TNT2/VOODOO3/G400 will work under this X thing right?
> 30 megs.
The X server for my ATI is about 800K.
I'm wondering how many megabytes do you need for installing, say,
Windows 95 (if it is downloadable at all).
> Get the picture? Here's approximatley 150 megs of downloads so far (kernel
> sources + KDE + QT + SO51 + WP8 + X335). Add on top of this the lack
> of a packaged, up-to-date system, (Even Slackware is up to kernel 2.2.12, X335, with KDE and GNOME, compared to Debian, this is light years ahead) with a recent version of X, or
> a recent kernel, and you begin to wonder why people are still using
> Debian.
What's so difficult for apt-get'ing all those packages? All you need is
to know what package to download first (eg: if you don't have your X
running yet, it's not quite useful to install Gnome).
>It's simple -- because we're a bunch of techno-snobs. Debian's
> hard to use, and we like it that way. We'll leave it to Corel to make
> Debian easy. We don't WANT everyday users. We like Debian the way it
> is. We like feeling superior, adhering to a higher standard of Free,
> and the warm and fuzzy feeling we get from whizzing around a cryptic
> console in front of a newbie.
Debian is easy to use, IMO. Well, the other Linux I have installed is
Slackware 3.5. I don't know what progress they have in Slackware, but
apt-get is much better than the tarballs (especially when the time comes
for you to _remove_ some program).
> Lately I've been thinking about forking Debian, into DWA,
> meaning Debian Without Attitude. We'll drop the attitude, and the
> pretenses, about what Free means, and get licensing deals with Corel,
> Netscape, and Sun, to include Wordperfect, Communicator, and
> Staroffice. We'll make the install process less cryptic, include
> non-free on the CD and forget the Debian philosophy, that the only
> way to learn is by doing it the hard way.
I think having a free (moneywise) OS and some applications to buy is a
nice deal. Compared to, say, forking US$1K+ first and then wondering why
you have to buy everything later (simple converters, viewers excluded).
> I'm going to get flamed for this. I know it. We don't want to
> think we're techno-snobs. We want to think our distribution is
> superior. We want to leave out KDE. We don't want Joe Blow to start
> with Debian, if he's not man enough to face up to Debian, he can go
> buy, ("Ha! Buy!", we Debian snobs say) Red Hat.
I haven't visited www.linuxchix.com lately; I'm just wondering whether
any of them runs Debian.
BTW, I'm not so clear what you are trying to compare; Linux vs. Linux or
Linux vs. Windows.
Oki
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