Re: Booting Debian/testing fails
On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 10:04:35AM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > Kantonix, Mepis, Ubuntu, and others *based* on Debian.
> > Personally, I don't think that Debian is geared towards newbies but more
> > towards admins and people who seem to know what they are doing. Hence
> > the formation of Kantonix, Mepis, Ubuntu, and others *based* on Debian.
> >
> > Unfortunately the distinction is not made clear anywhere.
If Debian decided to cater more and more for the nuances of newbies (and
what is a newbie anyway?) then I feel that the project as a whole would
suffer and the people who use Debian for certain reasons may find that
their requirements are no longer being catered for. These people could
quite possibly be DD's and seriously start to consider their motivations
in the project.
For example, I prefer to set up my system the way I want to, I don't
want a GUI whereas a newbie doesn't understand a computer without one.
Already you have a conflict.
> So does this mean that the Debian community, while helpful to newbies
> that know enough how to ask a question, would be happier if newbies who
> don't just went to one of those projects instead?
We *are* the Debian community. Some would, some wouldn't, some don't
care, IOW there is no specific community viewpoint and probably never
will be.
If someone doesn't know how to ask a question then *any* project will
have difficulty helping them. This is probably the Catch-22.
> If this is the case, we should still have the big button but say so. Or
> have links to those projects as suggestions among others. I think that
> such a simple thing would go a long way to making the debian website
> more newbie friendly. Similar to notice at the head of a difficult
> trail warning that inexperienced hikers are more likely to fall off a
> cliff. Help is available to get you out but it could take a week.
If you suggest it, and someone who has the authority to action it, likes
the idea then it may happen, but I'm guessing it has probably been
suggested before and either good reasons were issued about why it wasn't
a good idea or there was no one interested in implementing it. I could
be completely wrong though.
There are sites geared to helping newbies: linuxquestions.org,
tldp.org.
--
Chris.
======
Don't forget to check that your /etc/apt/sources.lst entries point to
etch and not testing, otherwise you may end up with a broken system once
etch goes stable.
Reply to: