> Huh. That's encouraging news. I'm only going
>by the system I have at work, which is a Debian
>machine. It is FAR, FAR easier to
>install/configure new software on it than
>Windows is, but it was irritating to set the
>machine up in the first place. Compiling the
>kernel was a lot of guesswork; fortunately the
>guys I work with are both sysadminy types.

Debian is the current "Geek culture" distro (although it seems to be rapidly being supplanted by gentoo and other "source only" distros). All the geeks over at /. think it's just the best ever. I'm convinced many geeks only like things that are completely indecipherable to non-geeks.

I've heard SO many times how flipping wonderful apt-get is. And I'm pretty sure it *is* great. But how do you propose I find out about the greatness of apt-get if I can't even get Debian installed?? I've NEVER seen a more horrific install program than Debian's, and installing and maintaining UNIX systems is WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING. Every commercial version of UNIX and every other Linux distribution I've worked with have had cleaner, nicer install programs than Deb's. What I want to be able to do when I install a system is to choose a major grouping of packages to install easily. Ideally I'd like to be able to choose something like "server install" or "workstation install" and then go through that SMALLER subset of packages and deselect ones I don't want, and if I see something I do want missing, be able to select it. I DO NOT want to have to go through EVERY PACKAGE IN THE DISTRO and decided individually if I want that package or not.

Poeple in the Free software/open source community live by the mantra of "choice is good". But to me, that's only true to an extent. I don't want an OS asking me to make decisions on things that no other OS has ever asked me about before--for instance, how do I know off the top of my head whether I want to install package X or not if I can't even figure out what package X *does*? The other extreme, however, isn't great either--I don't want a system that just assumes it knows what I want and installs it for me *without* asking. BUT, given a choice between the two, I'd actually choose the latter, provided (like in most Linux/UNIX distros, but unlike Windows) there's an easy way to list what's installed on the system and delete the stuff I don't want AFTER the install.

-- Dave