(FYI for newcomers, I had to re-install some linux servers a while back, and took it as an opportunity to tree different distros latest versions to see what happened. Redhat “Fedora” failed miserably, Mandrake is too proprietary for me to risk it, and I ended up with Debian after a great deal of pain).
(Hope this is of use for some people; I’m bored senseless @ 3 am having now spent about 5 hours trying to fix some moron’s mistake, so I thought I might as well write this whilst waiting for a CD to install…)
I just installed my laptop from scratch with Debian - in under 30 minutes!
I was seriously impressed. OK, so there are problems (more later), but hey - not only did it actually work but it even instructed you on everything as you did it (so you knew what was happening) AND you could keep going back and re-making old decisions!
(and, for anyone who doesn’t know apt [the plain/crap debian package-management tool], when you install packages, each one gives you an information screen about that package AFTER you installed, asking you any specific config it needs to do, or including warnings etc)
Only, the **** who wrote the debian installer is a complete ****ing ****: I then had to spend 4 hours discovering what a jerk this person/(people?) is. In their infinite moon-gazing wisdom they decided that - unlike all other linux distros - mere mortals who install debian are only ALLOWED a kernel with a tiny subset of the possible kernel modules. Doesn’t matter that all the others were on the CD. This person prevented debian users from installing ANY USB DEVICES when you install debian (have a system that requires USB? Ha! No chance! You’ll have to find non-USB hardware and then spend an hour or so compiling a new kernel with sane defaults) and other such madness. So if you need any of (rather a lot of things) in order to run your computer you have to start again from scratch once it’s installed and compile your own kernel.
User friendly? No frickin way!
Why do I care? Well, apart from the fact that my mouse is USB (sob) my network card is too - and is included in the linux kernel source! (it’s a pretty mainstream device!). But I can’t use it - so no LAN access, no possibilty of installing extra modules, no chance to fix all the other broken bits of the install, or to download FAQ’s etc (lucky I had a second spare computer here, really).
Anyway, on to the “there are problems” bit. Debian seems to be summarisable thus:
- it’s like a masterpiece that the painter died halfway through: a lot of it is excellent, the rest looks like no-one’s got around to looking at it yet
- there’s no documentation, but everything you try to do has extensive context-sensitive help (and I mean EVERYTHING: not just when you are choosing what to install, as with other distros, but whenever you do anything to your system - it’s like using Windows Wizards. Lovely. Except there’s no “back” and you can’t view the information afterwards. Which is especially sad since you get exposed to dozens of pages of text you need to write down by hand in order to refer to later :()
- they hacked a lot of standard packages and broke them. E.g. they broke Bugzilla. This is because they removed things they felt were unecessary but “forgot” to finish the job and remove the REFERENCES to those things (and forgot to tell anyone what they’d done!) so that the app breaks when it gets to the relevant point
- X-windows doesn’t work out-of-the-box on an nVidia GF2Go. Never a good sign!
Now some examples of the “masterpiece” aspect (the nasty installer was an example of the hackery + not quie finishing the job you started):
- you can install a new kernel (get this, ladies and gentlemen) by TYPING TWO LINES OF TEXT! Literally! From scratch!
- …except the instructions, in 3 different sources INCLUDING THE DAMN F.A.Q.! start with the text:
“cd to the kernel directory. If you don’t, this won’t work”.
for the record, this is the only time I’ve ever encountered kernel-compilation instructions that DIDN’T BOTHER TO TELL YOU WHERE THE KERNEL DIRECTORY IS. (FYI for linux newbies: you have to do this bit by hand, which is not mentioned in all of the three places, and so it could be “anywhere you chose to put it”). - but, when you do, it automatically:
- does the “Linus made a strategic error when deciding how you compile kernels” multi-stage make stuff all automatically
- creates the image automatically (although IIRC it has the wrong initrd setting by default, which is bad)
- installs the image into the boot dir
- runs LILO
- …except the instructions, in 3 different sources INCLUDING THE DAMN F.A.Q.! start with the text:
- aptitude is probably the best package-mgmt system I’ve ever seen on linux (I’ve seen better stuff on commercial UNIX IIRC).
- it’s like SuSe’s (which is much much easier to use than anything from RedHat) except:
- it isn’t full of bugs and keeps crashing/screwing up
- it’s much better at automatically resolving things, and showing you what’s going on
- it’s almost easy enough to use that a normal PC user could cope with it first time. The only problem is the insistence on using cryptic case-sensitive commands all over the keyboard for doing everything. You have to press ? for help about once every 10 seconds for the first 5 minutes
because there’s so much to memorize - BUT…it’s not even mentioned in the official FAQ
- …and it’s not used by default
- …and they don’t exactly go out of their way to tell you it exists
- …and it won’t let you re-view the installation notes for anything you installed (as mentioned earlier, so you have to write it down, or take a photo of the screen, or something!)
- it’s like SuSe’s (which is much much easier to use than anything from RedHat) except:
