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.
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.
Interesting. I agree that getting automated security upgrades right is super important. IMO even technical users should not be doing security upgrades manually. They should happen by default and be builetproof. On Ubuntu and I guess Debian, unattended-upgrades is supposed to do this. But over the years I have had terrible problems getting it to run reliably when the internet connection is unreliable, i.e. on a laptop rather than a server. That is revealing. I don’t understand why fixing this is not more of a priority. We cannot invite normies onto a platform where security requires babysitting.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. I agree that getting automated security upgrades right is super important. IMO even technical users should not be doing security upgrades manually. They should happen by default and be builetproof. On Ubuntu and I guess Debian,
unattended-upgradesis supposed to do this. But over the years I have had terrible problems getting it to run reliably when the internet connection is unreliable, i.e. on a laptop rather than a server. That is revealing. I don’t understand why fixing this is not more of a priority. We cannot invite normies onto a platform where security requires babysitting.Yess, totally. Fedora Kinoite will get automatic updates soon. But while I like the idea, its still semi-rolling and not a stable distro actually.
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.