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.
Yeah but why is it not recommended for noobs? I was a noob once and I managed on Debian just fine - once past the ordeal of working out how to make the boot stick. That is what I really meant by “hard to install”, but everyone took it to mean the installer software, which has been noob-friendly (if ugly) for years now. I should have been clearer about that.
What? I installed Debian last week, and I think it took something like 4 clicks, and setting my username and passwords. I installed it because I couldn’t get Ubuntu or OpenSuse to install (guessing because I have a 3090 GPU paired with an old intel 4770k/Z97 chipset).
I get your point - but here’s the thing: your average Windows user doesn’t even know how to install Windows. And for a good subset of them, even installing a browser extension is a challenge.
About downvoting, as far as I can tell Lemmy’s default sort order is Hot, so most recent. But I usually switch it to Top, so by points. IMO downvoting to disagree is a complete anti-pattern. Effectively what you’re doing is silencing someone as a lazy alternative to expressing your disagreement with them. Literal cancel culture. They knew this 20 years ago, hence Slashdot abandoning downvotes in favor of words like “Interesting”, “Funny”, “Irrelevant” etc. But that was too complicated for the R-site, so here we are.
I 100% agree that the Debian installer has a lot of room for improvements, just from the top of my head
Make default installations much easier
Collect needed information before installation starts (instead of the a little information, a little installation process at the moment)…
OTOH, and that is the main selling point: The installer is very flexible, if you know what you are doing and my specific needs are therefore easier served with the Debian installer than that of other mainstream distributions.
In the end, I would happily see a username-password-one-click default option for the Debian installer while not taking anything away from the current one. (Just move all the input to the front.)
upgrading is a total pain. I can imagine many people just dont do that at all. Like, no official documentation, anywhere you can actually find it? No automated command? Literally manual editing of a sources file?? Checking for held or not upgraded packages again to avoid breakage?
apt is pure garbage. Nala is king, and I think they should switch.
I think a fully self updating and upgrading Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite with actually good presets would be user friendly. This means no broken Firefox, flathub, automatic updates, some services enables, some fixes here and there. Easy install, everything preset, install Flatpak apps through the GUI and forget it. Automatic upgrades should be held a month or so to avoid breakages.
Yes of course. But the apt frontend is horrible. Nala wont fix the completely manual upgrading process, but it automates some other things like updating the repo metadata.
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.
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?
(Pure) Debian is almost never recommended for noobs, I don’t understand the discussion. People would usually recommend Mint for Windows users.
Yeah but why is it not recommended for noobs? I was a noob once and I managed on Debian just fine - once past the ordeal of working out how to make the boot stick. That is what I really meant by “hard to install”, but everyone took it to mean the installer software, which has been noob-friendly (if ugly) for years now. I should have been clearer about that.
What? I installed Debian last week, and I think it took something like 4 clicks, and setting my username and passwords. I installed it because I couldn’t get Ubuntu or OpenSuse to install (guessing because I have a 3090 GPU paired with an old intel 4770k/Z97 chipset).
Here’s a more user-friendly workaround.
I’d rather install Arch. It’s crazy.
I get your point - but here’s the thing: your average Windows user doesn’t even know how to install Windows. And for a good subset of them, even installing a browser extension is a challenge.
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About downvoting, as far as I can tell Lemmy’s default sort order is Hot, so most recent. But I usually switch it to Top, so by points. IMO downvoting to disagree is a complete anti-pattern. Effectively what you’re doing is silencing someone as a lazy alternative to expressing your disagreement with them. Literal cancel culture. They knew this 20 years ago, hence Slashdot abandoning downvotes in favor of words like “Interesting”, “Funny”, “Irrelevant” etc. But that was too complicated for the R-site, so here we are.
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IMHO it is really hard to talk about installers.
I 100% agree that the Debian installer has a lot of room for improvements, just from the top of my head
OTOH, and that is the main selling point: The installer is very flexible, if you know what you are doing and my specific needs are therefore easier served with the Debian installer than that of other mainstream distributions.
In the end, I would happily see a username-password-one-click default option for the Debian installer while not taking anything away from the current one. (Just move all the input to the front.)
This is absolutely untrue, Debian even ship with proprietary drivers now. Stop spreading misinformation
Hm I dont agree that its fine once running.
I think a fully self updating and upgrading Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite with actually good presets would be user friendly. This means no broken Firefox, flathub, automatic updates, some services enables, some fixes here and there. Easy install, everything preset, install Flatpak apps through the GUI and forget it. Automatic upgrades should be held a month or so to avoid breakages.
but nala is only wrapper it don’t work without apt
Yes of course. But the apt frontend is horrible. Nala wont fix the completely manual upgrading process, but it automates some other things like updating the repo metadata.