Re: Why is the Debian home page so boring?
I'm not saying that the home page couldn't be improved, but remember
that Debian is not a commercial distribution, so there is no reason to
give the appearance of trying to sell you something.
When I was a Linux newcomer a couple of years ago, it was actually the
simplicity and lack of clutter on the home page that appealed to me and
helped me get going with Debian. I wanted to know basically what Debian
was and how do I go about getting it and installing it. The answers I
needed were right there in very simple terms.
If any of Debian's advanced features had been described there, I
wouldn't have understood or appreciated them anyway at that point.
Tom
Svante Signell wrote:
>
> 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
>
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