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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."
3 Years is an insanely long time. That's why I run debian sid, which has had a new release in the 3 minutes that it took me to read your post and reply to it.
Badass Resumes
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
Calling this a beta is misleading. Etch is currently the Debian 'testing' distro, which means it is undergoing constant, incremental updating. All the people that complain about the slow release cycle, or expect the packages included in this 'beta' review to be the same as what you'll download tomorrow, don't understand how Debian works.
The time between stable releases is indeed quite long, but when a new app version is released by the upstream developers it often appears in Debian unstable within a day or two, and from there into testing in the space of a few weeks. Which means you can have a (slightly) unstable Debian system that is at most days behind the most cutting edge distro, or an almost rock-solid Debian 'testing' system that is rarely more than a month behind. You're only stuck with the two year release cycle if you cannot tolerate any problems whatsoever. And if you are working on something that critical, you shouldn't be going anywhere near applications with less than 10 days of field-testing (the minimum to pass from unstable to testing) anyways, regardless of which distro you run.
yp.