[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

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



Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 02:07:39PM -0500, Michael Pobega wrote:
The one thing I really don't understand, though, is why people use Ubuntu.

bleh. responsing anyway...
I return to the example of my mom. Many people don't want to "update"
their system. They want it to just work and stay that way. Many users,
especially novices, don't deal well with change and don't want
it. Ubuntu, if you don't upgrade, is perfect in this respect. At the
time it is released, it just works. If you leave it there, if will, of
course, just work forever.
[...]
But it's the same way with Debian Stable/Testing. If you want a system that just /works/, you can run Stable. If Stable is too outdated/doesn't support your hardware, give Testing a run. If you really need a few programs (For me running Testing, I'll use checkinstall as an example) and don't mind a few bugs you can always install from source (Since everything in the repositories is GPL/BSD anyway).
Maybe if Debian changed the word "/Unstable/" to something else it would bring in more users? Maybe Stable, Testing, and BleedingEdge? Just my thoughts.


[...]  how about "CuttingEdge" instead
of "Bleeding Edge" or how about just refering to sid only?
Referring to it as Sid seems like a good idea to me, but really no matter what it will be referred to as Unstable by the community; Which will probably just scare users away. The way I see it, is that the Debian mainsite shows that 3.1 Stable (Current) is the only "/workable/" release, and is very outdated. Testing (Which /apparently/ has bugs) is a bit more up to date, but not perfect. And Unstable will just break your system, but comes with the most updated programs!

In reality, running Debian Sid at this point in time is almost as unstable as running Ubuntu Edgy 6.10; Hell, even running Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 is more unstable than using Sid.

I really think the mainsite has too much of an outdated, old look to it. I think that is one of the main things that scares people away. I mean, compare for yourself:

http://debian.org/
http://ubuntu.com/



Reply to: