Re: why debian
On Monday 15 November 2004 10:41, Mark Crean wrote:
[...]
> Because it's easy to forget that the whole is greater than the sum of
> its parts. There are a raft of small touches than aren't much
> individually but which collectively soon add up:
to something that is very much a matter of taste, though
> superior
> anti-aliasing because files have been tweaked, careful choice of
> desktop theme,
which I always find I hate and have to spend time changing
> careful work on menus
which I then reconstruct into a more compact structure that I prefer
> , choice of fonts, window borders
that I would not have chosen
> , colour schemes, wallpaper,
surely each user has a personal feeling about wallpaper, and does not
benefit from having one chosen for her/him?
> automatic placement of icons for
> networking and devices, automatic mounting of windows partitions in
> fstab, dma for ide disks already enabled, a centralised help system
that is not very useful - far inferior to man and apropos usually
> that fires off one icon, etc., etc. Some distros do all this and
> some, like Debian, don't. These things all come under "look and feel"
> and are easy to underestimate,
I would have thought they were easy to overestimate.
> but they do have a marked impact on
> the user even if it's largely unconscious. Of course Debian has huge
> strengths...
Including coming with KDE already configured ready for me to undo...
> and it's not all one way at all, but I'd argue that for
> many folks these strengths are in the field of servers and specialist
> tasks, development and the like.
I don't know why I'm arguing, really. I suppose because I think the
eye-candy is entirely peripheral to what makes a good distro. I think
SuSE is terrific, but I prefer Debian (mainly for ideology and for
apt). I don't think the default KDE configuration is any easier to
remove in one than in the other, and it certainly is not a good enough
reason to determine which to choose.
--
richard
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