[Gllug] Linuxemporium - Pink Tie

Mark Lowes hamster at korenwolf.net
Fri Nov 22 15:13:17 UTC 2002


On Fri, 2002-11-22 at 02:12, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 15:35, George Saxby wrote:
> > I don't see how/why you claim that Debian is elitist,
> The technical knowledge "barrier to entry" is higher for Debian than for
> many other Linux distros. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the

However it's not insurmountable, I started on slackware and then
migrated to Debian, both of which didn't have pretty install systems at
the time.

I accept that for 'joe sixpack' anything which is 'hard' is going to
result in poor sales / take up, then again most home users aren't going
to even want to consider half of what's available from most
distributions.  They want a pretty desktop which gives easy access to
cd, floppy, usb-thingymies, scanners, etc etc.

They want a decent set of support for graphics, sound and printers and
the 'killer' apps (office suite, email / groupware) games etc.

They're almost excusively not interested in latex, emacs, vi, where the
configs are etc etc.

Mandrake is getting there, I just find it painful to use and dislike
some of it's assumptions about what I want to do.

[...]
> help the newbie who tries to run dselect.

:)  Nothing wrong with deselect, assuming suffcient beer or coffee.

[...]
> >  windows is not easy to install.
> It's easier to install than Debian. Windows looks at your harware, and

However you start tossing windows something which is a little odd and
you can have a multi-day fight on your hands where redhat/debian drops
in as if nothing is wrong.

[...]
> Actually, most people do care what OS they run. That's why they run
> Windows. If they genuinely didn't care, they automatically choose the
> technically superior system, and Windows would die. People want to run
> Windows, because they want/need/are forced to run MS Office/Quicken/IE/

Nope people don't care, they generally want what they're told they need.


-- 
The Flying Hamster <hamster at korenwolf.net>      http://www.korenwolf.net/
If reality doesn't fit the theory, reality MUST be changed!!!


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