I would not say Red Hat's is any better. I'm not thinking that pretty helps, though it doesn't actively hurt. I'm thinking that the underlying mental model of dselect is not obvious. At least it isn't obvious to me, and I've screwed it up on more than one case. (I have to admit that I haven't installed Red Hat for more than 5 years, and that they may have gotten better.)
This is not a complaint about Debian in particular, though Debian is harder than Red Hat. It's a complaint about all of the Linux distributions I use.
My 11 year old and 7 year old sons use Linux, and my non-technical wife uses it as well. They don't have any trouble, but that's entirely because I am able to maintain things. I can't imagine a non-technical person who could do it. In fact, at my workplace we make a debugger for Unix systems - AIX, Linux, Solaris, Irix, OSF1 mostly. Many of the engineers, not me, use Windows boxes on their desks with some kind of VNC or X display to get into the Unix systems they work on. They do this because Windows is considered by them easier to deal with than Linux. The VP of engineering would love to get them off of Windows, to avoid paying fees to Microsoft, but it's not working. These are engineers with decades of Unix experience, in kernel and compiler construction mostly. They think Linux is the best implementation of Unix around, but they don't use it as a desktop OS because it's too fiddly.
Now, you can say "Oh, they're just wrong" or you can say "Maybe things are really too hard."
Sorry. I didn't really mean to go on like this. This is not really the right forum for it, nobody here has the opportunity to do anything about it anyway, and if I really cared about it I would do something about it myself I suppose. It still seems wrong to say its easy as pie.
vasudeva wrote:
* on 03-22-04, Number Six wrote:
On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 08:55:57AM -0500, Bill White wrote:
I think Debian is hard to install. The magazine reviewers all say Debian is too hard to install, and the lists see a huge number of people saying it's too hard to install. Now you have a user who says it's too hard to install, and you ridicule him.
Maybe it's too hard to install.
It takes a month, and about 15 clean do-overs. Each individual element of hardware and eye/ear-candy is a journey of discovery (except for things like LPT ports and hard drives which "just work").
For the record, I've never found Debian hard to install, even when I didn't know much about Linux. I see people say the installer sucks everywhere I look, but it was fairly intuitive for me. I was evening installing over the net using a PC card, and had no real problems. Sure, I had the odd install go haywire on me every now and then, but out of probably 25 Debian installs, this only happened two or three times.
I realize I must be in the minority, and that Red Hat's installer *is* pretty, but I just don't see Debian's installer as the egregious UI disaster some make it out to be.
My two cents.
/></
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