[techtalk] why debian essay..

[Gordon Hart]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 11:25:04AM -0400, Kath wrote:
> Good essay.
> 
> But I think the real problem with Debian becoming a real mainstream and
> widely recognized distribution is that it is harder to get many peripherals
> working on it, while Mandrake, Red Hat and Corel make it super easy.

It would be great to see some things become easier but I hope Debian (at least)
doesn't try too hard to become any more mainstream than it is. There are real 
compromises being made in some distributions.

I'm fairly new to Debian myself, having recently migrated from Mandrake 7.2,
and I have to say it is a blessed relief. I was fed up of falling over the
config files for five programs all offering the same services and not
knowing which were working together and which were competing.. count the
ways to startup a dialup connection in Mandrake for instance. If I had to
sum Debian up in one word it would be 'tidy' .. not something I would say
of any mainstream distribution I've tried (admittedly only 3 suse,redhat,
mandrake).


> Mainly what I'm talking about is USB mouse support and SB Live (emu10k1)
> support.  Yes I know you can recompile the kernel and etc to get it to work,
> but for newbies, sometimes that is too much.  Especially when you can just
> pop in the Mandrake 7.2 CD, install and everything works.

Until it doesn't .. and then the problems start. At least in my experience
the other distributions did automate more, but used a multitude of
cooperating scripts and programs to achieve it (rather than one organised 
plan) and it seemed like a nightmare when you needed to tweak things. If
your not a newbie perhaps its not so bad, but it sems that the mandrake 
philosophy leaves newbies a bit stranded if they want to configure the
system (in any one of the ways I wanted to, or so it seemed).

> trying to get the aforementioned peripherals (USB mouse and SB Live) to
> work.  I finally just gave up on it and decided to use Mandrake as a
> desktop.

I stripped a mandrake system down (as far as I could) to bare bones
and began to tailor it to what I needed.. When the next release came out
there was just no way to upgrade.. changes to startup scripts caused
major confusion and dependencies began to force all sorts of unecessary 
packages on me .. until I was having trouble locating things again. 

In short, I hope Debian carries on pretty much the same as my impressions
of it are excellent and I think there is plenty of space in the linux
market to cater for different people..


> Okay, rant machine off.

aw thats no fun ;p