[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Martin Wheeler]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, tim hall wrote:

>  Debian has improved greatly over the last three years.

Indubitably so where the installation procedure is concerned.


> The attitude that I challenge is that it's not suitable for newbies.
> It is suitable for the kind of newbie that has time and desire to learn

I heartily agree.  It is definitely NOT suitable for the newbie who has 
got used to MS offerings, and simply wants to put in a CD, point, and then 
drool.  That type of user is far, far, better off with Mandrake.
(And btw -- I don't think there's anything wrong with that type of user.
I'm part like that myself -- I use Linux to //do// stuff; not to improve 
my knowledge of computer system architectures.)
The reason I personally eventually moved to Debian was simply because I 
began to want to do stuff the point-and-drool distributions made just too 
difficult.

The other point no-one has yet mentioned, of course, is that debian comes 
with a very good installation manual.  No one reads it of course (it's 
difficult to drool *and* read successfully) -- but it solves any problems 
the install interface might present.


> Compared to Windows XP, Debian is simple, straightforward and Just Works. If
> there's one thing that moves me to computer defenestrating rage, it's XP ;)

I fully second this.
Having been away from MS for a long time, when I came to have to operate 
an XP system, I found it anything but intuitive.  Truly.  I still can't 
use it properly.  (Don't want to, either.)
But compared to XP, Mandrake, Suse and Fedora 'just work', too.  (As do 
most distributions.)  The difference between them arises when you actually 
want to accomplish something which requires intensive interfacing with the 
underlying system.  At this point, you are *far* better off with debian.

Just thought I'd point that out.

Cheers,
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
GPG pub key : 01269BEB  6CAD BFFB DB11 653E B1B7 C62B  AC93 0ED8 0126 9BEB
       - Share your knowledge. It's a way of achieving immortality. -