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Re: Attracting newbies (Was Booting Debian/testing fails)



Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 07:15:44AM -0800, Michael M. wrote:

"why Debian instead of Ubuntu/SuSE/Linspire/etc.?" Do that and I doubt you'd get too many users for whom Debian probably isn't the best choice.


maybe our focus, as a trying-to-be-helpful user community is to
examine what the derivative offerings are and redirect people
appropriately. Now wait... I'm not advocating that debian activiely
steer people away from debian. I'm saying examine what a user needs,
and wants, and recommend the right distro for them, even if it is one
of the derivatives. The different stages of skill development and user
requirements frankly point to different distros anyway. I put my mom
on Ubuntu, not because I thought she couldn't handle deb, she
certainly could have, but because I knew that she wanted a "just
works" solution for her old PPC mac. It was perfect. Everything works
to her satisfaction out of the box. She in on dialup so has no real
major security issues, and since it all works, i haven't even bothered
to teach her how to upgrade. That was the "right" solution for her.
For many usrs, debian is just not the "right" solution at this
time. Maybe it will be for that user in the future. I would rather
refer someone to the "right" solution and have them get a good feeling
about "those debian guys" because they listened to what I needed and
helped me out. That is certainly better than dragging some novice
through the wringer trying to help them get their sound working or
whatever. Those users, if properly educated and handled will look back
on their brief debian experience with good feelings. They will
recognise that their current o/s is base don debian and will
ultimately do good advocacy for debian in some manner or another. And,
if they decide to pursue the computer "education" more fully and they
want the challenge and flexibility of running full-blown debian then
they can do so. They will come back to this community with *some*
debian based background, a positive attitude --having been treated
well the first time through, and a higher general level of computer
skills that can be applied to the problem.

This leads to the interplay between the derivatives. With derivatives
focusing on the end-user desktop, they can filter improvements
upstream to debian which will ultimately benefit debian and all the
other deriv's too.
meh. my .02

A
I fully agree with you. I think in reality Debian doesn't cater to a lot of people's needs (The more common desktop user just wants Beryl and eye candy, whereas Debian really offers only stability), and there's really nothing we can do about it.

I don't mean to change the subject, but I myself used Ubuntu because I felt that Debian was way too outdated for me. Then after multiple system breakages I decided to just switch over to Debian, and it ended up working fine. Debian has all the positives of Ubuntu (apt, deb files, etc.) without all of the negatives (I hate having to do a dist-upgrade, especially in Ubuntu since in Ubuntu it breaks your system 80% of the time). When I first came to the Debian community, I was told that I should go give Ubuntu a shot, and I did. And as Andrew said, I inevitably ended up crawling back to Debian and settled with the (Somewhat out of date) testing distribution. And to boot, I was so happy when I (Just yesterday) changed my sources.list from etch to testing, because now I'll never have to do a distro upgrade again.

What I'm trying to say is, if we are just a kind community and we don't lie to potential users, they will probably come back to Debian; And if they don't, they will at least have no gripes or negative things to say about it.

The one thing I really don't understand, though, is why people use Ubuntu. Please nobody respond to this or change the topic, but all I'm saying is that if you want something like Ubuntu use unstable; It is updated pretty often, equally as buggy as Ubuntu, but you never need to do a dist-upgrade. It just makes more sense to me, really. Maybe if Debian changed the word "/Unstable/" to something else it would bring in more users? Maybe Stable, Testing, and BleedingEdge? Just my thoughts.



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