Thus spake Levi Bard on the 28 day of the 10 month in the year 2002:
>
> My experience is similar to Syd's. Debian (2.2/potato) was one of my first installs, on a laptop (Compaq Presario 1247). I found the installation to be every bit as easy as Redhat's. I booted the first CD, let it walk me through partitioning (I already had the worthless "restore" partition with which to play), selected the things I wanted installed, and let it crank away. Gnome-apt was every bit as easy and intuitive for me as gnome-rpm or gnorpm or whatever redhat had at that time. The hardware all worked (integrated touchpad, via 686 soundcard, pcmcia 10/100 nic, usb (with install of the 2.2 kernel usb backport, which is no longer necessary)) This laptop still has Debian on it, although I have since used apt to upgrade to sid.
>
> Of course some people don't/won't like Debian, and that's fine, but I don't think Debian should be an automatic rule-out for newbies.
Ditto Syd and Levi's experiences. Debian's not perfect, (and I haven't
played with gentoo yet), but so long as you have the patience to read
the Debian and LDP documentation, it's possible to do Debian...even as a
newbie. The install isn't always trivial, but it usually isn't that
complicated. It isn't toaster-simple, but if you want that level of
simplicity I suggest you try Lindows...or Mandrake if you don't like the
OS equivalent of walking around in a hospital gown. ;-)
(Slight Digression for Newbies: I would not recommend Lindows. It's
just not safe, as it runs everything as the root user.)
You don't pick Debian because the install is easy. You use Debian for
essentially three main reasons:
1. Trivial to keep up to date with security patches.
2. Trivial to install software after the initial install.
3. Trivial to upgrade between major versions.
I know of no other distro (other than Debian based ones) that do all
three of these things without paying some sort of monthly fee, or paying
for upgrades every few months. Even with the additional costs, they usually
don't do major upgrades nearly as smoothly as Debian does.
I've ranted about Debian too much on this list, so I'll stop now.
-- Matthew MoenDebating unix flavors in the context of anything Microsoft is like talking about which ice cream flavor tastes least like sawdust with turpentine sauce.
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