Steve Lamb wrote:
[snip]
As for usability it came up with gdm, gnome+kde (I prefer KDE but gdm is good in its own right) and the only applications I installed were Firefox and Thunderbird though I could have jused used Mozilla versions of those that were installed and be done with it. First order of business was to check my mail and open a document someone had sent me. Open Office was installed and already configured, Thunderbird knew where to hand it off. In short I went from install to productive with only 3 package installs in between and no configuration. That isn't polished how?
Because it's easy to forget that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are a raft of small touches than aren't much individually but which collectively soon add up: superior anti-aliasing because files have been tweaked, careful choice of desktop theme, careful work on menus, choice of fonts, window borders, colour schemes, wallpaper, automatic placement of icons for networking and devices, automatic mounting of windows partitions in fstab, dma for ide disks already enabled, a centralised help system that fires off one icon, etc., etc. Some distros do all this and some, like Debian, don't. These things all come under "look and feel" and are easy to underestimate, but they do have a marked impact on the user even if it's largely unconscious. Of course Debian has huge strengths and it's not all one way at all, but I'd argue that for many folks these strengths are in the field of servers and specialist tasks, development and the like.
:)
Fish
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