On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 07:53:30PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote: > An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0 > Submitted by bfeeney on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 21:41 > http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=831 OK, responding section for section... Installation: He makes comments extensively on SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake, but shows no real understanding or explain his issues with the Debian installer other than that it "is the worst installer [he's] had to use." He also implies the base install is too simplistic. Not to be overly critical, but he seems to have no real grasp at the concept of being bloatless. Installation requires the lowest common denominator. My beef with the Debian installer is that it won't make a best guess on partitioning. Seperately but related, X doesn't attempt any autodetection, even the minimal stuff in XF86Setup from XF86 3.3.6. Setup: He complains that the setup refers you to documentation that is not yet installed. My understanding is you are expected to have a copy of the installation manual handy and at least have some idea what it's telling you. Yes, the menu options should be clearer, however, I disagree with the idea that software should babysit the user and hold them by the hand. The writer clearly shows lack of clue and ability to RTFM with his comment about module selections. Package Selection: I just have to plain wonder if this guy has taken a good, long look at dpkg and apt-get. I do agree with his beefs about the annoying help screens at every turn in dselect. Worse yet, I've been hitting space to clear the damn thing since bo, only to have them change it to enter this revision. Why can't it be both? I've never heard of, or experianced, the kind of funkitude with failed packages cancelling the whole apt-get download like he claims. The Installation Overall: I'm with him right up until he suggested hiding things behind "Advanced" buttons. Sorry, but I don't see how making the installation less intuitive and more complex somehow magically makes the installer droolproof. I also don't agree with the idea of using branded names instead of driver names. Maybe have a help option that explains the branded names to the drivers, and definately an autodetect option. Don't sacrifice efficiency for those who know what they're doing in favor of those who can't be bothered. I agree with the idea that dselect needs to be redesigned, however, making it more like a GUI will only confuse users expecting it to work just like a GUI, and will actually make dselect more painful to deal with than vi, instead of slightly less painful. The Configured System: I'm just going to summarily dismiss all bitching about KDE. KDE sucks. Gnome sucks. CDE sucks. Cocoa sucks. Microsoft Explorer sucks. All these systems are too baroque, adding unneeded complexity for the user to wrap thier brain around instead of presenting them with the actual system. Sorry, but mv, cp, ls, find, and a newbie oriented text editor aren't that hard to learn how to use. I mean, my compuphobic art-geek sister can figure it out. Hell, my WinBigot(tm) roommate was even able to figure out that much. Debian has pretty complete documentation of configuration files in the comments in those files. I haven't had to look in man section 5 in a very long time, around the time I had to reinstall due to accidentally deleting /usr back in early 1998 thanks to improved documentation in comments. Control panels are thus very much dead-weight. Conclusions: I have to seriously question whether or not he knows what he's talking about about RPM. I've used RPM recently. It's still painful to use and terraparsecs behind apt-get *still*. Even with urpmi. apt-rpm segfaults on machines with low RAM. Package names are *still* not standardized. Versions still conflict badly, and upgrading the system is still a "fsck me harder" experiance. I strongly disagree with the idea that we should create yet another method for configuration. No. Webmin works. Linuxconf works. $EDITOR works better, and the config file comments usually have more helpful information than webmin and linuxconf do, and it's usually faster. The Debian Desktop idea is almost a good one, but then again, that's why themes.org exists. Why duplicate that effort here? Granny proof: No. I'm all for accessiblity, but you should never stop learning. Plus, trying to granny proof anything leads to bloat and a shitload of bugs. Need proof? Look at Gnome. Look at KDE. Look at Nautilus. Take a long look at Microsoft Explorer. Notice how they all fail at that goal, and notice how buggy and bloated they are. This is not an honorable or obtainable goal, time would be better spent trying to find lost cities of gold. > Debian GNU/GNU/Linux 3.0 Woody > Added: October 19th 2002 > Reviewer: TwstdRoot > http://linuxwatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=index&req=showcontent&id=7 As of 4:45AM PDT, this site was not accessible. -- Baloo
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