On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 07:15:44AM -0800, Michael M. wrote: > "why Debian instead of Ubuntu/SuSE/Linspire/etc.?" Do that and I doubt > you'd get too many users for whom Debian probably isn't the best choice. >
maybe our focus, as a trying-to-be-helpful user community is to examine what the derivative offerings are and redirect people appropriately. Now wait... I'm not advocating that debian activiely steer people away from debian. I'm saying examine what a user needs, and wants, and recommend the right distro for them, even if it is one of the derivatives. The different stages of skill development and user requirements frankly point to different distros anyway. I put my mom on Ubuntu, not because I thought she couldn't handle deb, she certainly could have, but because I knew that she wanted a "just works" solution for her old PPC mac. It was perfect. Everything works to her satisfaction out of the box. She in on dialup so has no real major security issues, and since it all works, i haven't even bothered to teach her how to upgrade. That was the "right" solution for her. For many usrs, debian is just not the "right" solution at this time. Maybe it will be for that user in the future. I would rather refer someone to the "right" solution and have them get a good feeling about "those debian guys" because they listened to what I needed and helped me out. That is certainly better than dragging some novice through the wringer trying to help them get their sound working or whatever. Those users, if properly educated and handled will look back on their brief debian experience with good feelings. They will recognise that their current o/s is base don debian and will ultimately do good advocacy for debian in some manner or another. And, if they decide to pursue the computer "education" more fully and they want the challenge and flexibility of running full-blown debian then they can do so. They will come back to this community with *some* debian based background, a positive attitude --having been treated well the first time through, and a higher general level of computer skills that can be applied to the problem. This leads to the interplay between the derivatives. With derivatives focusing on the end-user desktop, they can filter improvements upstream to debian which will ultimately benefit debian and all the other deriv's too. meh. my .02 A
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