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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."
The Debian Installer can install Slackware then?
Hate me!
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.
True story.
an oxymoron? :P
Why not have a single selection at the beginning that says "Install all defaults"? Hit that, let the installer figure out all your hardware settings, and come back an hour later with a fully installed OS.
Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need?
I have been pwned because my
Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?
the installation seemed to contain a lot of stuff I didn't know. At least they had recommended choices to keep some unwanted stuff from happening.
Hasn't Knoppix made the Debian installer a moot point for Bob 'Average' User, at least for the desktop?
Complete with linux 2.2.20 and XFree86 4.1.0.
If he had never installed any OS from scratch before, sure, he would be confused - but he would be just as confused if he had pulled out the raw W2K install disks on a rainy Saturday.
sPh
With RH losing a lot of stock in the tech world, I foresee Debian becoming more mainstream. The only problem about this is, Debian is usually an elitist group of users. Many users of Debian before I switched (06/2003), would just say... "You use Redhat? What are you a girl or something?" I just told them, "Bah... you stink! RPM is the coolest thing ever!" Well, I wish I could have gone back to the days when I was stupid. :) The new Debian install almost makes it as easy to install as Windows. I don't think a GUI is needed for installing an OS onto a machine, plus it causes overhead in the installer and on the disk.
IMHO... someone should create a "smart" installer that says... "I see you have Windows installed. I can remove it for you. Please press return."
I don't think it would be any problem. A good scripter/programmer could easily figure it out. I wish I could...
"Debian... Next to Jesus, it's the only way to Heaven"
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
So this is where RedHat 5.x installer went to... I was wondering what happened to it.
A lot about the process can be learned this way. Most of us are used to this process, and think it all makes sense, but, as the author points out, there are a lot of things that WON'T make sense to "Bob User."
Debian should have a look a this to see what they can improve.
IBM is doing something smart, a call went out to employees looking for volunteers to install Linux on their company laptops. This is a great way to start, because those employees will probably feel a lot like "Bob" but have access to internal tech support.
Wouldn't you like to convert your friends without having to be THEIR tech support?
Several times to install Debian/Gnu on my SGI Indy. As a relative cherry when it comes to goofy installs this is a problem. The websites I have found all seems to take for granted nuances I should probably already know but are left unsaid. Suuch things as WHICH machine to set up WHAT file on and suchlike. The Indy is an r4400 with 96 meg and a 4.3 Gig HD. It does NOT boot from disk. Instructions aimed at knuckleheads such as myself need this goofy level of detail to learn things y'know. I do have a pretty decent redhat 9 machine on the network here that is supposed to be used for the TFTP bootloader but there is detail about setting that up that is also left unsaid. It would be really cool if someone actually tried to understand that there are geeks out there that dont know things and want to learn.
Dammit.
Stupid Humans.....
...especially if they put Kudzu or something like it into the mix to autodetect things like Knoppix does.
/home directory. Anyone who doesn't do this is asking for trouble. Knoppix's knx-hdinstall doesn't, and requires some wizard-level incantations to repair.
I especially like the option in the auto-partitioner for a separate
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
If it were truly easy to use, there would be no need for a walkthrough guide... each screen would present choices, and offer help if needed. Software installers should NEVER require external documentation.
Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users". Please let us retire "Bob" and "Aunt Tillie" and "Grandma" and every other stupid target user.
If you don't agree with my statement in the first paragraph go look at http://www.google.com - great for newbies AND power users. I've never heard anyone say "Google works fine for Aunt Tillie and Uncle Bob but I really could use MORE features to the interface." Its interface is clean, simple and completely intuitive. And if you want to do some arcane power search you CAN!.
And if google isn't a good enough example for you (because its a website and not an OS, etc.) look at GNOME. GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor. And BTW gconf-editor IS super simple and user friendly ANYWAY!)
Besides, I am probably what most people would consider experienced with Debian GNU/Linux (been using it exclusively for about 3 years) and I like a good clean, intuitive interface over something that is so-called "geek friendly" any day.
BTW - No I haven't read the whole article yet, I saw the bob bit and HAD to get this off my chest before I read the rest (now I will).
I certainly hope that Debian's Arabic support isn't as bad as that in the installer- the letters don't connect! They're typed from left to right! This would be like having the English installer say something like the following:
(ASU)hsilgnE ni deecorp ot siht esoohC
Except that its even worse - imagine all the i's seperated from their dots, which are written separately next to them in linear order. And even that would be less ridiculous.
As someone who does use Arabic frequently when computing, it's something less than a stunning endorsement of Debian
I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.
By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.
Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.
Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.
Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)
Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.
SoupisGood Food
Hmm, I have XFree86 4.3.0 and linux 2.6.3. Both installed from packages (actually I compiled 2.4.3 for this machine, but my server uses the stock debian 2.6.3 kernel).
Anyway, yeah Debian Stable is old. That's a feature.
Debian unstable, however, is bleeding edge, but not broken. It's great. Much newer than any other distro.
Debian gives the user the choice of old packages/high reliability or new packages/average reliability. That's better than semi-recent pcakages/semi-decent reliability that Mandrake, Fedora, Slackware, and SuSE offer.
Thanks, apt*.
* Other distros have apt, but Debian's is better because the debian developers use it properly. I've NEVER had a dependency problem (problems yes, but they weren't too bad). Apt is the best feature of any operating system I've ever used.
My other car is first.
My rants...
Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.
Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).
I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.
With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.
More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.
The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.
I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Wouldn't making Linux easy defeat the purpose?
Not to be a troll (I use linux myself, gentoo) but... what is so special about easy to use GUI installers? I think Microsoft and RedHat have been doing it for quite some time.
_________ Help me get a PSP!
Though the earlier screen had told him that his selection would affect his location he was still at the same place, in front of his old PC. ...and...
But it didn't matter as he just had deleted his Windows 98 with fdisk.
The "average user" is happy to see that the computer didn't teleport him somewhere else, but can still figure out Windows 98 fdisk???
Online reviews would be much better if we could moderate by throwing rotten fruit at the author...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
For what it's worth, I am the "Bob User" that he wrote for, and the article seemed to fairly accurately reflect the thought process that I would have gone through.
As far as easy installs go... I've plugged this before, but I think it's worth repeating that Arklinux has a really smooth install (including a little Tetris game to play during loading). After using Knoppix only a few times, I was able to install Ark on a Compaq laptop and give it a whirl.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but I'm dual-booting Ark on my home computer, and I've switched to using it exclusively (except when I'm playing Disney's Toontown, which only runs on I.E.), and I know next to nothing (I sort of know what a command line is, but that's about it.)
It's still in Alpha, so do be careful, but I would HIGHLY recommend it for clueless "windoze" users looking to get their feet wet.
The Dalai Llama
I would while away the hours conversatin' with the flowers... if I only had a .sig
My sig could be your sig!
Debian has it harder than the other guys; most distributions focus on just one platform (intel), or just a few (alpha, sparc, powerpc). Debian supports 11 hardware platforms. They need a flexible system that supports the needs of all of them. I'm not personally knowledgable about the internals of either the Debian or Mandrake installers, but this is probably one of the reasons they can't just use an "off-the-shelf" installer from another distro.
- new easy to use partitioner that supports automatic partitioning and LVM
- grub as the default boot loader on i386
- wireless networking support
- 2.4.25 kernel, with SATA support and security fixes
- support for the XFS filesystem
- support for these architectures: i386, ia64, sparc, m68k (mac), mips, alpha
- fully translated to 25 languages
- a boot logo (by Mark Riedesel)
- a draft installation manual
Why is it that there are so many people out there who just don't like things the easy way?? Mostly i think they just pretend to like the harder command line interface and wag their tongues when they see a lovely easy click n go installer.heh.
But seriously , easy installation is one of the key factors through which Linux or unix based systems can gain more marketshare in the desktop section.
Lord of the Binges.
The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.
Google says Bob will use XP with the preinstalled NTFS and it's quite probable he doesn't want to dump it immediately and because Debian still doesn't support non-destructive NTFS resizing thus the install will fail for him.
I guess this is sort of a reply to many people, not meant to be a troll or flamewar type of comment. While I do agree that the Debian installer has been notorious for being a bit overwhelming the first few times you use it, if you don't agree with the way that the installer is setup, then maybe you shouldn't use it. There are plenty of setups for different linux flavors that do things like auto partition/auto detect hardware. (think redhat, and mandrake) while others require a bit more from the installer. (Think debian, slackware) Rather than attempt to change an installer that is targetted to a certain group of people, it may be more beneficial to try to find an installer/distro that is more designed for what you are looking for. In the past few years I have used Redhat, Debian, and Slackware installers (and those based upon them) and found that Slackware suits my needs. It is simple, console based by default, and requires a bit of background knowledge of my hardware on my part, but is also not too difficult to use. Redhat, for me is a bit to "spiced up" to my liking. And I find that Debian's system can be a bit confusing when installing software packages. That doesn't mean that Redhat should be like Debian, Debian should be like Slackware, and so on, but that we should all find what niche we like, and be happy with it. This topic comes up a lot when on the subject of desktop environments, window managers, distros, etc.
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
hmmm. I just installed with the new debian installer today, and what kernel do I have? "Linux rei 2.4.24-1-686 #1 Wed Feb 18 21:59:13 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux" And X? "XFree86 Version 4.2.1.1 (Debian 4.2.1-12.1 20031003005825" Granted that in the 2.4 series they're up to 2.4.25, and 2.6.3 is out, but those are also both available and pretty damn painless to upgrade to. And, yeah, some distros have XFree86 4.3 (including unstable) but it's not like 4.2 is ancient.
Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.
If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.
That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.
When building beowulf-style clusters, RedHat kickstart has been one of the quintessential installation tools. Its not the only way do things, but its the one I find most useful in my particular setups.
The lack of a kickstart-like installation automation tool for Debian-based systems has kept my clusters RedHat-based exclusively. Does the new installation tool help with this? If not, why not? I know its been requested many, many times. This functionality is entirely too useful to really ignore.
A use for it that even run-of-the-mill boxes might like is that if your box needs a reinstall, simply reinstall using the kickstart script provided after the original install is complete. The machine will then reinstall in exactly the same manner as before, though you may or may not have to apply updates.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
I have been using Redhat/Fedora for a year now, and I have been using apt for rpm with it. From my past experiences with Debian, I must admit that apt for rpm on Fedora has fewer packages to choose from, and in order to get a good selection, you tend to have to use several package repositories that conflict with eachother... ends up being pretty unstable. ...I am considering making a switch from Fedora to Debian once Sarge is released.
why Joe User or Bob, rather, is installing debian anyway? The last Debian install I did was on a AMD 5x86/100 tablet (three nights ago). Before that, it was on my Dell Inspiron 1100 that had a crockload of not-well-supported hardware that required me to get 2.5.69 (the latest release at the time).
Debian installs usually take me several hours to get most things going from the mini/net install (a linux distro occupying 80 MB on your HD?--yeah, debian does that) to a what-I-consider usable system. However, I've configured everything myself exactly to my liking and probably recompiled once or twice.
Before I go further on my disorganised rant, a graphical easy to use installer that detected everything and booted me into KDM/X with KDE (I use enlightenment and gtk apps) would do nobody in Debian's core audience any good whatsoever and probably only alienate them further.
Tho I have to say, a few years ago, Storm Linux had a really kickass installer. Progeny's doesn't/didn't require you to reboot afterwards.
So I probably should be saying that if Bob wants a Linux distro that's easy to install in the beginning yet insanely powerful in the end (thanks to apt), he should be dealing with Progeny or whatever other debian-based distros there are.
The article did Debian a tremendous disservice in juxtaposing a mythical user with a distro that he'd never try.
P.S. My favorite install of all time is OpenBSD's. A twenty minute script was all it took--and I hadn't installed OpenBSD before. How kickass it that?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
As I understand it, the new Debian installer is designed for two purposes - portability to all the architectures Debian uses, and flexibility so Debian can be installed just the way one likes it on the widest possible variety of hardware. Idiot-proofing is a lot lower priority. You may disagree with their prioritisation. I personally think that if you're not prepared to spend a few minutes reading some instructions before you install a new operating system and totally change the way your computer operates, you shouldn't be installing a new operating system anyway.
If you want an all-singing, all-dancing, drool-proof, but less flexible Debian installer just for i386, I believe Progeny has built one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yes Billy, you can. For instance, assuming you have a stable and an unstable source for your packages, you could do:
apt-get install ssh/unstable
and it'll get the version from unstable.
You can make pretend you have a real operating system.
You can even install cdrecord and burn CDs effortlessly.
Works great! No stupid gui to get in your way.
Rick Moen has a great page of alternative Debian installers if you don't like this one.
Bob "Average" user wants to perform the following steps:
1. Buy PC
2. Plug PC into electrical outlet
3. Have PC "Geek" friend connect it to the Internet
4. Surf porn and play video games
Bob "Average" user DOES NOT want to install new Linux distributions for the fun of it. Bob has other things to do.
Let Bob use a PC with pre-installed Lycoris, Lindows. It's OK Really! That's all he wants!
Debian can be installed over the FreeBSD kernel: here's some more information on that
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
This is the kind of problem that could really put off an average user if they encountered it (although maybe RAID isn't a feature you'll find used in many average machines), since most distributions tend to refuse to install in the best case, and in the worst cases will sometimes contain stupid default settings which will trash data on my drives if I allow them to continue. Does anyone know a distribution that copes better with issues like this than those I have tried? Is this new version of Debian likely contain this feature (although I've heard bad things about the usability of the Debian installer), since I'd love to give it a try if it doesn't mean huge amounts of effort on my part. If anyone could recommend a distro that might be easier to install than those I have tested, I'd love to try it out, since I've grown bored of the wait of several hours to install packages on my current Gentoo setup (although it was interesting to play with for a while).
Can you mix unstable and stable apps together with apt-get?
Yes, as others mentioned. And you might want to check out Debian Backports. It is a repository of packages for debian stable that are newer than what is provided in the stable distribution, but designed to work with stable.
The packages in backports are built to work on stable, so they use the libraries and stuff within stable wherever possible. The package selection is smaller than if you just started pulling stuff from unstable, but the changes to your system and risks to stability are minimal.
I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).
:)
Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*
Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.
Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons
RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)
Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.
Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.
BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).
Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.
This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!
As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I find Gentoo a lot easier than Debian to install. I've installed Gentoo on x86es and SPARCs without much of a headache. But try as I might I cannot get Debian to install right on any platform. I've tried dozens of times; I've gotten a bootable system maybe 5 times and never gotten X to work. For some reason installing Debian reminds me of programming a VCR, which I also can't do.
It's like on the one hand you have RedHat or SuSE-type installs where you get a nice GUI that makes installing easy. On the other end you have gentoo which gives you a full shell and I'm good with using a shell so that install was pretty easy too. But Debian lives in this weird in-between world (like a VCR's interface) where you don't have an intuitive GUI but you also don't have a shell's freedom to put what you want where you know it needs to go.
So, long story short, I can't get Debian to install, but I don't have problems with Gentoo. Maybe it's a matter of taste.
All's true that is mistrusted
Why should they?
:)
Debian isn't meant to be a newbie distro. It's a powerful OS, IMO not for the uninitiated. I always suggest RH and more recently fedora. Why? because for almost any package you can get the RPM's for it, and apt-get on redhat works great too. Plus, it's really easy to get your stuff working while not hiding everything from you.
You may want to take this all with a grain of salt though, Since I use Solaris on my workstation, slack on my laptop, and WinXP for games/movies/music in my living room. Also, FreeBSD on one server(2x Xeon), Redhat on another(2x Xeon), and fedora on another(4x P3 Xeon), in production! (yeah, i'm crazy like that
Why exactly - marketing aside - should the installer care about an average luser? People with no clue nor willingness to acquire one are the main source of virtually any computing problem we have, be it security, spam, worms, whatever.
I don't want Joe Idiot being able to install a computer. No matter how you do it - and Debian is quite good in warning users about unsafe settings - Joe will fuck it up and bring another machine that's already as good as compromised online. Thanks a lot, Joe!
Please, care about the clued-in sysadmin. Give Joe the finger. In fact, IMHO the install should fail and tell the user in no uncertain terms that he's too dumb to run this system if he tries something like setting an empty root password.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Gentoo threads get overrun by people talking about how great Debian is. That starts flamewars.
You almost never see a Gentoo user start an anti-debian thread in a Gentoo story. It's always started by some anti-gentoo/pro-debian comment.
Debian threads (like this one) get overrun by people flaming Gentoo for no apparent reason at all. It's always a Debian user that brings Gentoo up like some ex-girlfriend that slept with their friends and dumped them.
Level headed people like myself that use both OS's step in and start shooting down the zealot posts.
Moderators that use Debian mod those posts down no matter how on-topic or sensible they are simply because the post is pro Gentoo, or just honest.
A lot of the slams on Debian are from Debian users with a sense of humor. I've seen a ton of these. In fact, the joking slam in this thread was started by a Debian user if I'm not mistaken. This inevitabley lead to an anti-gentoo post for no apparent reason, like the guy that complains about the ex-girlfriend that slept with his friends then dumped him, and consequently can't find anyone that wants to go drinking with him anymore after work.
Debian is great.
Gentoo is great.
They both have their place. Gentoo isn't your ex-girlfriend that slept with your friends and dumped you simply because it's better at a lot of things.
Debian is great on servers, and that's what it should be used for when your bosses aren't screaming for Red Hat because Oracle likes it, or because Polyserve likes it, or because EMC likes it, etc.
And no, I'm obviously not new here.
A lot of you need to rest your necks. The jokes are funny. I love slamming Debian once in a while if it's a damn funny time to do it. I'll also step right up to the plate and slam Gentoo as well. It's when the zealots start getting all serious about their pet OS and start making ridiculous assersions about another ones that their true colors show. Imagine what someone that has never used either Debian or Gentoo thinks after reading this stuff? They'll walk away thinking that Gentoo is too hard for them (and it isn't. A braindead monkey could follow the install instructions), or they'll think (wow, them Debian users are kinda extreme, foaming at the mouth, radicals). That isn't good for anyone.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
This is the very first time that I have seen someone call Debian a handholding OS.
I tried the new installer yesterday (and Debian for the first time) and was everything but impressed. It very much reminded me of the days I spent with the text base install from RH6.1. The console keyboard settings were wrong (especially annoying with vi) and after installing XFree I had to configure stuff I hadn't touched in years (being a long time RH and now FC user).
Getting Debian on my system was like reliving long lost memories, but not necessarily good ones. Fedora installs so nicely on all of the hardware I tried it so far and I hear that SuSE works like a charm too.
Don't get me wrong though, there are reasons for why I tried Debian and I would very much like the distro to strive and get a modern hardware detection and installation system. Knoppix so far holds the crown in the former IMHO. And before I forget, a stable release with more recent software would also be quite nice ;-).
I feel so sig.
Firstly to install a very basic Linux system which will allow you to get onto the Internet and download all the latest packages.
Second use is to install a system from the CD tailored to your needs.
In both these cases I feel Debian's installer requires too much fiddling around. What it needs is menu with "Typical role for this installation" and options like:
[] Desktop computer
[] Web Server
[] Database Server
[] Minimal install
[] Custom
The custom option would allow you to setup the packages you require and allow you to load one of the presets to base your custom selections on.
Also why can't the installer be a bit more intelligent and read the current disk layout and make some clever suggestions?