[Glastonbury] Newbie to Glastonbury LUG

[Sean Miller]

That was a bit moody wasn't it? Blame it on the time of night.

Sorry about that, Andy. I am just sick of "Debian this, Debian that..." and
people supposedly gloating when any distros other than Debian appear to be
either changing or disappearing... can't you all see that in reality Debian
is a distro that is never going to make Linux what it should be, because it
makes no attempt to appeal to the mass market, to take on Bill Gates head-on
? It is, in effect, the Linux equivilent of RISC-OS on the Acorn Archimedes,
an operating system that might have all sorts of good things about it but
demands significant time and effort in training before you can do something
as simple as install it on a laptop....

....compare my easy installation of RedHat9 a few weeks back with the
nightmare evening at the LUGOG trying to install Debian, followed by about
90 minutes at Martin's house on the phone to somebody, and still only a very
limited OS resulting (though the man on the end of the phone seemed to think
it a personal triumph that by the end we had a 640x480 black and white X
running).... this isn't the way to get Linux onto the PCs of the world...
Knoppix (a distro that is allegedly Debian but is clearly too embarrassed to
admit it in case somebody suggests the mainstream Debian distro comes into
the 20th century too) is heading in the right direction... still isn't up to
the standards of RedHat imho, but it's heading in the right direction.
Nicely able to detect hardware, but the fact you have to type "knoppix
noscsi" to get it to boot (because, I believe, it thinks the IDE on mine and
Martin's laptops are SCSCI cards and crashes) shows that (like its parent)
it fails at the first fence when it comes to being accessible to "the
general public"... they're not going to know to do that!!

> In other words,  no coherence in life. Struggling to find something you
> like, and throwing it away with a pinch because you just can't find
utopia.
> We have Linux as a concept that doesn't need to be branded, that has many
> vendors, many evangelists and many many many nooks and crannies to be
> found...

It was almost Midnight -- I get frustrated when people start belittling my
opinions and fight back. Apologies, your experience is clearly massive and I
should not belittle it -- unfortunately the fact that you feel this is a
"credentials" issue proves my point... my argument is that to use Linux you
should not *need* to have spent 20 hours a day for 20 years installing
stuff... *anybody* should be able to do it quickly, intuitively, and should
end up with a stable implementation that will last.

> You hack shell scripts? Very admirable... as somebody who has *programmed*
> shell scripts for a few years, I think that hackers are great... but of
> limited use.

Blimey! I wrote this... cor blimey, gov, you lot really get me wound up
sometimes!!

> > > This is LUGOG (Linux User Group Of Glastonbury) *NOT* DUGOG (Debian
User
> > > Group of Glastonbury) -- PLEASE bear that in mind.

That was my most sensible statement last night... I am sick of seeing people
enthusing about this "apt-get" functionality and taking every opportunity to
slag off tarballs, source code compilations and rpm.  Diversity is what
Linux is all about... let's keep our eye on that fact and we won't go far
wrong.

Debian sucks! That's all there is to it... but many of you like it, and that
is your perogative. I had not realised that there was this "panel of
protectors" that spent years evaluating any software that is released to
ensure that it is "stable" and will not corrupt the finely tuned Debian
installations of their disciples. My mistake.

Sean