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Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review
Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."
What happened to Joe User?
Just wait, in a few years it'll be Jagdish 'Shudras' User.
What happened to Joe User? Did he finally wise up about using GUIs and get fired or something? I never really liked Joe User, anyway (I mean, what an idiot!), I'm just curious.
Joe User got tired of always having to hear people talk down to him. He eventually sold his computer on eBay and moved to the beach. Now he camps out under the stars, gets laid every once in a while, and never has to listen to superiority-complex-driven introverts make him sound like a total asshole.
Bob "Average" User tried Linux, but was quick to detect a hateful tone from the community when he asked questions. Once he sees how he was portrayed this time, I'm sure he will be happy to go back to Windows again where he can ask for help without being treated like a lead-paint-eating four year old just because his printer isn't working.
FIVThat's because you are tracking the "stale" release, if you want this year's apps, you need to track the "flakey" release and if you want really cool stuff, you need to track the "oh_crap" release.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I'd say Gentoo isn't for you. You'd be better off with something more tuned to your skill level. If reading the instructions here is a problem for you, then you'd be better served with a more hand holding OS like Debian. The only strange hardware problem I had with install "SATA drive" was fixed by following the very simple Knoppix install method outlined on that same page. All the weird compile problems I've had over the last 2 years or so (all 3 of them) were solved in a few minutes by reading stuff here. Reading must not be your thing, or you have strange hardware. I personally couldn't imagine running anything but Gentoo on any desktop I use because of the excellent performance, documentation, security, and ease of upgrading. That and all the bleeding edge stuff in the world is at my fingertips in record time to be compiled however I want, when I want. This is what is important to me though. If I was lazy, I'd probably pay for RedHat 3.0 WS for the strong vendor support and excellent upgrade ease. I'm not lazy though. I don't mind putting in the bit of work up front to be very lazy afterwards and have the fastest Linux distro possible. The performance gains are very real, and very noticable. And you don't have to wait 13 months for XFree 4.3 only to find out that OpenGL is broken. I'd never use Gentoo on a server, but I can't point to a single time where a machine rebooted spontaneously. I did have to recompile mplayer once because it was unstable, but that took all of 3 minutes? Seriously. Most of the people that moan about Gentoo are either:
A) Trolls
B) Debian Trolls
C) Not using the distro they should.
Gentoo isn't afraid of you.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.