Joel Roth wrote: > I suppose the answer is that there is no shortcut to > administering a system than learning the details.
Nope. No such thing as a free lunch. And in the free(dom) software community we have the additional free market burden of many different sources. There are many different authors and competition between them for usage. Competition makes things more difficult because of the differences but it is a good kind of difficult. Let's say you write a program and I write a different program. We have come from different worlds. I am this side of the tracks and you are that side of the tracks. Our software will be different. I will write my code to be configured the way I like and you will write yours to be configured the way you like. What are the odds that these will be the same configuration styles? Probably zero. Almost certainly your method and my method will be different. Apache does things different from OpenSSH which does things different from MySQL which does things different from GNOME (nobody does things like GNOME) and on and on with every different project. Along comes Debian and tries to package these upstream projects. Debian needs to provide some consistency. Therefore it will modify each of our projects so as to fit within the common Debian framework. They might even try to convince us that we would be more friendly if we changed our way of doing things. Some projects are easier to make fit than others. > (Well, except the user-friendly cocoonlike existence > that is the default experience under Windows and OSX.) After having gone through the fire with those many times I don't consider those user friendly. I just went through a full disk recovery on MS Windows 7 a few weeks ago and I was not happy for a significant effort. It was a PITA. If it had been Debian it would have been a trivially easier recovery. If even a fraction of the questions that get asked here on this mailing were for MS or Apple the answer would be to buy another machine with it preinstalled and start again. For example what would MS or Apple say to all of the questions about running the system from a portable usb storage device? Sure it is possible there. But what would they say about it? Bob
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
