David Blackman wrote: > > I love Debian, I use Debian, I administer Debian at my > school. Why do I use Debian? Because my school uses it. Why does my > school use it? Because they didn't like the GUIness of RedHat, and > Slackware is just too much of a hassle. Plus, they were drawn to apt-get.
Yes, I like apt-get... ... > > Okay, I've just installed Debian/GNU Linux (Don't forget the GNU!), it > only took me 3 hours to get through all those cryptic installation > questions. now where's my full featured web browser? > <Well, either you've got small broken browsers (arena, gozilla), > or a broken version of Netscape called Mozilla. Yes, I have downloade Mozilla, and it doesn't run (segfaulted). I downloaded Netscape instead. The newsreader and mailreader not included; well, I think it's still _much_ better than having to write your own browser from scratch. > Now, can I edit my MS Office docs? > You might be able to look at them, but definitely not edit them! > What about this StarOffice thing I keep hearing about? < > That's a 50 meg download. Have you ever try to download MS Office (for Windows)...? (if it is downloadable at all.) ... > No, we don't include the sound modules, you'll need to > recompile the kernel by hand. Compiling kernel is not that difficult; "make menuconfig" and then "make zImage". ... > And my TNT2/VOODOO3/G400 will work under this X thing right? > 30 megs. The X server for my ATI is about 800K. I'm wondering how many megabytes do you need for installing, say, Windows 95 (if it is downloadable at all). > Get the picture? Here's approximatley 150 megs of downloads so far > (kernel > sources + KDE + QT + SO51 + WP8 + X335). Add on top of this the lack > of a packaged, up-to-date system, (Even Slackware is up to kernel 2.2.12, > X335, with KDE and GNOME, compared to Debian, this is light years ahead) with > a recent version of X, or > a recent kernel, and you begin to wonder why people are still using > Debian. What's so difficult for apt-get'ing all those packages? All you need is to know what package to download first (eg: if you don't have your X running yet, it's not quite useful to install Gnome). >It's simple -- because we're a bunch of techno-snobs. Debian's > hard to use, and we like it that way. We'll leave it to Corel to make > Debian easy. We don't WANT everyday users. We like Debian the way it > is. We like feeling superior, adhering to a higher standard of Free, > and the warm and fuzzy feeling we get from whizzing around a cryptic > console in front of a newbie. Debian is easy to use, IMO. Well, the other Linux I have installed is Slackware 3.5. I don't know what progress they have in Slackware, but apt-get is much better than the tarballs (especially when the time comes for you to _remove_ some program). > Lately I've been thinking about forking Debian, into DWA, > meaning Debian Without Attitude. We'll drop the attitude, and the > pretenses, about what Free means, and get licensing deals with Corel, > Netscape, and Sun, to include Wordperfect, Communicator, and > Staroffice. We'll make the install process less cryptic, include > non-free on the CD and forget the Debian philosophy, that the only > way to learn is by doing it the hard way. I think having a free (moneywise) OS and some applications to buy is a nice deal. Compared to, say, forking US$1K+ first and then wondering why you have to buy everything later (simple converters, viewers excluded). > I'm going to get flamed for this. I know it. We don't want to > think we're techno-snobs. We want to think our distribution is > superior. We want to leave out KDE. We don't want Joe Blow to start > with Debian, if he's not man enough to face up to Debian, he can go > buy, ("Ha! Buy!", we Debian snobs say) Red Hat. I haven't visited www.linuxchix.com lately; I'm just wondering whether any of them runs Debian. BTW, I'm not so clear what you are trying to compare; Linux vs. Linux or Linux vs. Windows. Oki