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Debian turns 30 – and important to Linux world as ever
(www.theregister.com)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.
Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.
So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.
UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.
UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.
I remember installing Debian in 2008 as a complete linux noob and only pressing the space bar to install it. Has the procesd changed in the meantime?
Yes, once you have the install medium, i.e. today a bootable USB, it is just a question of clicking to accept defaults. So, back then, unless you got a CD-Rom delivered to you by mail, you must have done much more than "press the spacebar". I also managed to install Linux back then as a noob, but it was not a easy process, I only managed it because I was very motivated.
So, exactly the same as windows.
Can you even order windows on a CD anymore?
Sure, but an ordinary user does not have to install Windows since it is already there. This is Linux's burden. IMO a lot of techies in this discussion are underestimating it.
Who is going to pay Dell, HP, Acer, etc to install Linux?
Just because MS can throw billions at these OEMs doesn’t make that “Linux’s burden”.
See also Dell & Lenovo sell laptops with Ubuntu.
So, in concrete terms, you are disputing that Fedora and Ubuntu make this chore much easier than Debian does? Or you just don't care?