Hey, One thing I found humorous was the "This is simple fundamental stuff, the kind of thing most other distros had sorted out back in '99 when everything was via textmode and the Linux GUI was new and exciting" The thing is, Debian is *not* most other distros. And I mean purely from a philosophical standpoint. Apart from a few notable mentions, Debian doesn't make money. The whole system is put together by volunteers. As far as I'm concerned, It's a miracle (and a testament to human community and spirit) that it *even exists*. In a world ruled by commerce, I choose Debian. Debian hasn't got this "fundamental stuff" (or as I call it, fundamental fluff) worked out, because where Redhat, SuSe et al, would give man hours to this stuff prior to release, the Debian package maintainers were giving there attention to important stuff, ooh, like I don't know... dependencies, and bugs, and package inter-operation. So I would look at the commercial distro's dependency hell and say "This is simple fundamental stuff, the kind of thing Debian had sorted out back in 97 when no one knew what Linux even was." Have a look at the Debian source packages and see how many source trees need diff's just to compile together into one system. Rather than just package and forget, Debian takes care to make sure things work (in a binary <-> binary way, not a .conf file way). So I agree with a lot of the points in the article. "I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can't do that right now and I think it's important people understand why." Is Debian really something you want to recommend to your friends? Maybe other geeks, but most of my friends don't know the computers power switch from the CD eject button! And I want to "recommend" them an OS where they'll have to understand what a /dev/ttyS0 is? Bah! When people ask me what computer they should use, I ask them, what are you going to use it for? If they say, "Playing games", Id say get a Playstation 2. If they say, "Just browsing the net, and playing games", then I'd say windows. If they said, "Something reliable and sexy to do illustration work on" Id say OS/X, and if they said "something for me to convolute a massive data set for my final year Physics prac", I'd say... Stay the course, Debian. You're sailing fine. Seeya Crispin Wellington
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