Re: why debian
> Just my 2 cents, but trying to make everything relative won't do. There
> are plenty of standards by which things can be judged (whether
> anti-aliasing, interface design or meringues smothered in strawberry
> sauce) though whether someone likes them or not is merely a question of
> taste. Some outfits put a great deal of effort into being user-friendly
> for new or non-technical users (which includes setting up networking and
> putting help icons on the screen) and others do not. Some people believe
> that reaching out to such users requires a quite different approach from
> appealing to IT professionals or developers' peers. Good design can be
> assessed objectively and it does matter.
I think I agree with that, even though I have no intention of moving
away from Debian.
I don't think what scares people away from Debian is the visual polish
and that kind of stuff. It's the deeper configuration stuff that is
NOT obvious and that forces you to learn about the system. For example
I installed Sarge on my laptop, it did not correctly detect radeon
graphics card, and loaded default 800x600 resolution. I had to go into
my X configuration file and add "1024x768". Other people might not
have known where this file is and what it contains. Then the fonts
were ugly so I had to look for and install the ones I wanted and
configure X to see them and use them. Then there was no firewall by
default so I had to figure out how to set up a firewall. Had to check
out the iptables and ipchains man pages, decide it's way too
complicated and that I don't have the time or the will to become a
firewall specialist, and finally find a reference to firestarter and
guarddog on some mailing list. All this at the cost of a few hours.
Then I entered the long hard slog of trying to get power management
working. To this day I have not been able to do it, and i'm leaving it
for next week, or next month, when I'm gonna have the time to
reconfigure and recompile the kernel. Hell, I'm not even sure which
kernel I should start with in the first place. And it took me hours to
figure out the difference between vanilla, and other flavors. It
always seems to be understood. I'm supposed to be doing a doctorate in
physics at the same time, and a bachelor's in computer science was not
a prerequisite last time I checked.
And this is my favorite. Trying to mount a USB key. There is no usb
key device, like there is one for cdrom. It gets mapped to a scsi
device (for some reason), the first one, because I don't actually have
another scsi on my computer. /dev/sda1, not /dev/sda. Terrific. Except
on my new computer at home that does not work because I have scsi hard
drive so USB key gets mapped to /dev/sdb1. Of course. Not /dev/sda2.
And that's in 2.6.8. In 2.6.9 it's something completely different like
/dev/uba, but it doesn't work because 2.6.9 is in Sid so it's still
buggy. Count another hour or two of confused googling to figure all
that out.
Then, I gotta configure pppoe. So I call pppoeconf, configure the
thing. Doesn't work.
I have to edit manually my /etc/network/interfaces and
/etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider files.
Restart the network with the command /etc/init.d/networking force-reload
Do pon dsl-provider.
Doesn't work.
Restart my computer.
I see two pppd processes, two pppoe processes, and ifconfig says the
interface is configured no problem, everything should be dandy, but
isn't. I kill all the processes, I do pon dsl-provider again.
WORKS. After a few hours of different attempts.
Of course, this is for somebody that knows about ifconfig, about where
the configuration files are, what the commands are, etc. Otherwise
you'd be completely lost and run screaming from Debian. With me it's
different only because I am notoriously stubborn.
And even if all this is just my bad luck, or maybe I'm just dumb, you
can't tell me that all the people that I run into, and they ask me
what I use, I say, Linux Debian both on the laptop and at home, their
reaction, even if they use Linux too is: "Debian! Jesus, you're not
kidding around!". You can't say they're all crazy. Debian is
challenging. It's not for beginners, or it's for really really
stubborn beginners like me. Besides I love the philosophy behind the
thing, and apt is awesome.
But I don't expect everybody to be like me. Some people I have seen on
some of these lists however, especially some of the very
knowledgeable, DO.
Sometimes I hear arguments like:
"I like to spend hours configuring everything by hand, myself, in text
mode... Debian is great for that. Therefore Debian is great period!"
Alex.
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