Monique Y. Herman wrote:
On Thu, 04 Dec 2003 at 23:35 GMT, Paul Morgan penned:You are dead right, of course. I keep forgetting that there are folks new to Unix, even, installing debian. Which is really great.It's great, but ... My first linux install was done by a friend. Even redhat was hard for me to figure out at the time (granted, redhat's installer back then was probably more cryptic than debian's installer now). We can have newbies using linux without requiring them to install it for the first time. Installs are the hardest part of using *any* linux distro.
I tried to install Windows a while back (windows 98 about 2 years ago) and while the installation worked, I was *never* able to get the hardware working *consistently*.
Reliability drove me nuts! My experience has told me this:An initial impression based on the installation may be very important to those who are interested in a quick "test drive" of the product and for those interested in publishing an article on the latest net-zine.
Marketing types would insist that this is the highest priority. It is a priority, but not the highest.What is going to matter in the long run is not what happens in the first day of use, but in the next day or next year. I've been sorely disappointed by these commercial distributions (Windows and Linux) that came in a pretty box.