Re: Is Debian ready for the desktop?
On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 09:23, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> Ueli Meier wrote:
> > What where your reasons to switch to debian?
> >>Could you explain more?
> >>What does it mean Debian is not tuned for the desktop, more work to
> >>install? Or is there more to it?
>
> I used to use Suse on a couple of servers an workstations. I got fed up
> by it, when I realized that my shiny new Suse-laptop would not work 'out
> of the box' with our Suse-server, which was one or two 'versions'
> behind; ie. file exchange and printing would not work. I switched the
> laptop to debian and later instead of upgrading the servers and other
> workstations to newer Suses, I installed debian on all our machines.
>
> Main advantage: debian is a lot easier to maintain, once set up; less bugs.
> Main disadvantage: maybe it takes a bit longer to configure graphics,
> mouse etc. for first time users.
>
> > What is more flexibility, can I install less pakages than with other
> > desktops and save harddisk space and memory?
>
> Well, probably any distribution has a package managment system to allow
> selection of more or less packages for installation. Debian's apt is
> said to be superior to rpms in checking for you what additional packages
> are required, if you want to install application xyz. It also
> automatically removes these additional packages, when at a later stage
> you decide to remove xyz. In that sense, it's probably easier to decide
> which packages you can savely remove to save disk space, if the default
> 'workstation' setting is to bulky.
>
> On installation you could start with a minimal setup and then manually
> add all packages you need. Selecting things like 'kde' would install a
> lot of other packages as well, but only the essential stuff, ie
> openoffice et al. can be installed seperately.
>
> Johannes
Thanks for all the answers, I will give it a try.
Ueli
>
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