[Glastonbury] Newbie to Glastonbury LUG

[tim hall]

On Monday 06 October 2003 07:00, Sean Miller wrote:
> 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, 
[...]
> demands significant time and effort in training before you can
> do something as simple as install it on a laptop....
[...]
> 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. 

OK, In all seriousness, it's WAY to easy to get into a flamewar about this 
kind of thing. Linux users need to support each other. End of story.

Debian does not suck. Any ideas of what Linux 'should be' are merely your own 
predilictions. Yes, we need distros like RedHat/Fedora, Mandrake, Suse et al. 
because ordinary desktop users want something they can fire up quickly and 
use to get on with work. They all have their different pros and cons, but we 
don't have to measure ourselves by Microsoft's yardstick. Linux should and 
can provide both the 'quick'n'clean' solutions and the ultimately 
customisable and geeky, not necessarily in that order, and all manner of 
different flavours and permutations.

However, I spent years sitting in front of a Windows box dreaming of an 
operating system that works the way /I/ want it to. I found that in Debian. I 
have tried & looked at other distros and they don't suit me, personally. As a 
newbie user, admittedly with plenty of time, I found Debian to be perfectly 
fine to get along with and I now have the OS I'd been dreaming of and it's 
about as far away as you can get from the world of Windows.

The reason you're getting so much flak for this Sean, is that you didn't give 
Debian a fair crack of the whip - ok, so it's not the distro for you - but 
then proceeded to go on about how much it sucketh. For someone who claims to 
have as much experience in the UNIX world as you do, you deserve all the 
ribbing you get.

> Farleys rusk, anybody? ;-)

Good, that's much more like it :-)

tim hall