On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 08:38:45AM -0600, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Depends which *people* Debian targets. Myself I think the Debian install
method is just about where I want it, I must be one of the *people*.
First as a newbie you do RH and KDE. Then you see that is way too much
and without finetuning. Then you get to Debian and FVWM and you get to
run a finely tuned machine that is just where you want it.
Remains one serious dependency... The Debian organization...
Is Debian an 'organization' of a 'community', or what? Try, if you
can, to treat this as a serious question. I'm not close enough to the
center of Debian to have an answer, but the Woody installer gives some
clues to what it was. It seems that in the recent past, Debian was
guided by a group of sysadmins, who wanted to share and automate the
work of administering a small local Linux shop. The install process
was good enough to get started, and didn't get in the way of
administering a working shop. In particular, it was good enough to
allow new people to join, and progress to the point that they could
become maintainers and help run the show. But a user of Debian is
never really treated as a customer. The mindset seems to be that
others on the list are themselves sysadmins, or, at least, aspire to
be serious power users.
Now, distributions that have a business model that sees users as
customers are having financial problems, will Debian change, and
become more 'user friendly'? The core organization of Debian doesn't,
it seems to me, really need tag-along users like me. They do need to
proselytise, so that they maintain their own ranks. But beyond that, I
don't see much beyond altruism driving the public face of Debian.
Thanks, Debian maintainers.