Why is the Debian home page so boring?

[Svante Signell <svante.signell@telia.com>]

Hello,

I've been running Debian on one of my home network computer for a
while now. Starting from slink, upgrading to potato and following
further upgrades to unstable/woody. The combination of apt-get update
and apt-get dist-upgrade is really excellent!! Combined with the
power of dpkg maintaining and upgrading Linux is EASY, especially
compared to other distributions. It took some time to get used to
though, but the excellent mailing lists have been very helpful. By
following mailing lists you realize a lot of things are happening
behind the scene.

On other computers I have RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE distributions. My
first installation of Linux was RedHat 5.0 a few years ago. Since then
I have been installing and upgrading rpm-based distributions. The
installation of Debian was something I thought about to do for a long
time, but wanted to wait for the Potato release -:( Since the release
of Potato "never" happened, I finally decided to make a try with
Slink! I don't regret taking that decision, debian is one of the best
distributions.


Now to the point:

Looking at the Debian home page, one get the impression that only the
now very old Slink distribution, with kernel 2.0.36, old X, old libc,
etc, released March 1999 is available. The News section mentions the
testing of a new distribution is ongoing. NOTHING is said about the
power of apt-get and the ease of upgrading using the web to more
recent software.  Also, nothing is mentioned about the availability of
kernel-2.2.15, XFrre86-3.3.6, glibc-2.1.3, etc, already today, even
BEFORE Potato has been released.


Following is a proposal on what to emphasize on the FIRST page:

1. Rewrite the Getting Started section, e.g. inform about the large
   number of architectures and packages supported. This surely
   attracts new users.
2. Something on apt-get, and upgrading from the web.
3. Rewrite the News section, e.g. add links to recent packages
   available, with highlights, updated frequently.
4. In addition to the Weekly News link, add more frequent updates to
   the News section. Surely, by following the excellent mailing lists,
   you realize much more is happening than what is reported on the
   first page.

PS:
On the wish list for the distribution I would like to add an smp
kernel. Other distributions have. Today this has to be made manually,
even if excellent tools are available for this.

Best regards,
Svante Signell