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A Look at Debian Etch Beta 3
An anonymous reader writes "The All about Linux blog has a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian — Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks ar the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3 as well as what the Debian team could do to make this not-for-profit Linux distribution even more popular."
I have net-installed debian over a phone line, a full desktop with firefox and icewm, abiword, gnumeric, etc.
The initial X setup was frustrating because I downloaded a bunch of stuff for the wrong video card. However, even with that the whole setup took less than a day. The final installed image was less than 600 MB (excluding the package cache, which I apt-get cleaned).
So it is definitely possible. A lot of bloat needs to be addressed in Debian as in other linuxes -- I am pretty sure it could have been half the size. This was more than a year ago however (not that Debian changes that fast).
Other installers solve the problem by having a hotkey (eg. F11) that saves PNGs to a particular directory for you to browse after the install. Much nicer.
Back in the day, Linux installers truly suffered from complexity and other ailments. This was one of the reasons that turned people away from running Linux. Recently, many graphical updates have cured Linux of these ailments. IMO I think that the current debian installer is perfectly fine. While I understand that there is always room for impovement, perhaps it is time that distros moved on to tackle other problems that prevent people from using Linux more commonly such as wireless support.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
OK, it's nice to see someone trying to give an even handed approach to a distro. But I think there are a few points that could be improved upon.
In the end there are some comments about the Debian web site regarding the use of weblogs for technical support and a cleaner site so you can find the razor sharp release of etch.
Weblogs for technical support suck. There are better ways of doing it. I have found mailing lists to be far superior to web logs for the simple reason that they are more accessabble, easier to read (no ads, no extra content fighting for your attentions) and above all else, filterable by machines and humans based on content, writer, and subject. Weblogs are for little people who want to talk about support, not get it. Yes, I'm very opinionated about this. I've yet to have a good experience with weblogs and technical support.
Debian Etch 3 is not for the new user. If it was, it would be called stable. Yet everyone insists on reviewing this one. The fact that it's harder to find from the debian front page is a good thing. I would not want to have to support something that hasn't yet been released. Similarly, expert mode is not for the faint of heart. Making a comment that it would be nice to provide more information for the new user in expert mode's use of FSCK is retarded. expertmode it not intended for the new user -- don't expect it to be.
Why does everyone have to review the installation process itself? Sure, it's the first introduction to the OS and that means something. But everyone makes such a big deal about nice looking gui installers. What's the value in a gui installer versus a curses based installer when you are trying to get the job done. I'm sure Debian will benefit greatly because of this but in reality it's not a requirement to getting the job done.
All that said, I would like to see reviews done not on the first 5 minutes of use of a distro but based on the first 90 days or 12 months of use on a distro. This is were it matters most. These 5 minute reviews are like a one night stand. You won't really know what you have landed until you see the make-up come off.
I have to confess, I'm a fan of Debian. Never tried Unbuntu. But I've tried Gentoo, RedHat, and Suse 9. After using these for 18 months I dropped them all and went back to Debian. That's my idea of a review. I had to use the things for a long period of time and live with their decisions long enough to understand what they were doing and not doing well.
Gentoo -- not my favorite. I like the idea behind it, but they have this uncanny ability during upgrades to allow the user to do amazingly stupid things based on stupid ideas to begin with. I trashed my fstab file based on an upgrade from gentoo. Why would the distro EVER consider upgrading a file like fstab? Really, if there's any reason why a working system should have one of it's most critical files ever considered as upgradable I would love to hear it. This is just an example of the difficulties in upgrading -- hundreds of diff files to sort through every few days.
RedHat -- They just had some weird stuff that was really inconsistent. Everytime I change my firewall rules, my ntpserver was disabled. WTF? Inconsistent behaviour that was never disclosed during the operation. And I don't like their GUI approach of making everything appear as one. Too socialistic for me.
Suse -- I used this one the longest and found the greatest problem with it over time. Suse does a superior job of supporting you hardware/software needs as long as you do exactly what they expect you to do. Installation of anything beside KDE you are stepping closer to the edge. Custom configurations of installations will push you to a point where Suse will not upgrade/manage that package for you and before you know it -- you're running a whole software space in customized RPM's or having your installation re-configured back to the basics during upgrades.
Debian -- It's not the easiest to configure. But it's the most polite about allowing you to make modifications, keep those modifications, and follow expected behaviours. And it's stable, allowing me more time to do the fun stuff.