[techtalk] Re: rpms r not-so-good and Linux-Mandrake

[Stacy Brock]

> Methinks there is a significant amount of
> Debian snobbishness floating around, not too unlike
> the Gnome vs. KDE desktop wars.  Why a distro has to
> be un-user friendly to be cool is beyond me, and that
> certainly is Debian's reputation.

Oooh, I just have to jump into the thread on this one.
;) Please send comments to me, or post them to issues,
as I'm skirting the Line of OT-ness.

I'm a relative Linux newbie (I've been running Linux
solely on my main box for about 6 months now). I also
use Debian.

Guess what? Even for this newbie, the install was NOT as
difficult as everyone makes it out to be. The Ncurses
GUI installer may not have the pretty penguin pictures
that Mandrake 7 and 8 has, but it works. Since Debian's
installer now uses "make menuconfig" instead of "make
config"...setup is fairly straightforward.

Sure, I didn't have my USB mouse working right off the
bat, but it took about 30 seconds to get on Google
(after "apt-get install lynx" of course ;) and find out
how to do it.

I've heard a saying among Debian users that goes like
this: "If you can't install it [Debian], you shouldn't
be using it." If you call that snobbishness, I can't
help you. However, I think that the saying really means
this: "If you aren't patient enough to RTFM, you
shouldn't be using it [Debian]."

And I think that applies to Linux as a whole as well. :)

Cheers,

Stacy Brock
Oregon State University
Computer Science
brock at mailbox.orst.edu