Clyde Wilson writes:
Clyde> I agree with you Kent. Debian is much too difficult to start out with.
Clyde> Redhat removes a lot of options to give you a working system without
Clyde> much configuration on your part. Later, when you are shooting for
Clyde> "guru-ship" you can go to Debian and really get into it. Both systems
Clyde> are a tremendous amount of fun!!!
This is the eternal problem of ergonomy vs. configurability, and I'm
not sure we'll ever find a really good compromise: I switched just yesterday
from redhat 5.1 to debian 2.0. I'm a computer scientist with a rather long
experience in Unixes so that didn't frightened me too much, but what I can say
from now is that:
1/ RedHat is much easier to install, but a PITA when you want to do (or learn)
special precise things. Providing a good looking tk interface for everything
is not enough to make things easier and moreover it hides the knowledge you
could acquire about the stuff behind (of course, you might perfectly not want
to learn anything).
2/ Debian on the contrary doesn't try much to do anything for you (or the
other way around, you have a maximum control), but remains much more
difficult to install. Personally, that's what I want: I want to learn the
inners of everything I use (I don't like to eat while not seing what's in my
plate ;-)).
IMHO the day where we'll have a really good compromise between
ergonomy and configurability is when a configuration interface is as clever
for setting the parameters as for providing all the information needed to
understand what's going on. But even this, is not necessarily what everybody
wants.
--
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