On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 05:41:23PM -0800, Van Snyder wrote: > On Sat, 2023-03-11 at 18:32 -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > The installation *process* > > doesn't change. After the base system has been installed, you're given a > > menu from which you can select additional software to install -- SSH server, > > various Desktop Environments, and so on.... > > > > After the installation is done, you reboot into the new system. From > > there, you can continue installing other packages if you want. > > Experienced users often have a good idea which packages they want, and > > may just do something like "apt install build-essential xorg fvwm mutt ...". > > Newcomers will probably take longer to learn what packages are available, > > what they do, which ones would be helpful to install on their systems, > > etc. > > With other distributions, for example back when Scientific Linux > actually existed, the list of "additional software to install" provided > by the installer was much larger. It included development software, > publishing software, web serverrs, .... >
Other distributions do things differently: CentOS/Red Hat/Almalinux and Rocky split their software down into slightly finer grained small collections of packages. I'm fairly sure that very few people go beyond "server with GUI" which has most of the twenty-odd subcategories in it. Red Hat is also, primarily, still a server distribtuion. And Red Hat-alikes ship many fewer packages by default - almost everything you find in Debian will come from EPEL or another third party repository. The GNOME metapackage installs 1300+ Debian packages - including games, Libreoffice and so on. It's a compromise for *most* users' needs. The tasksel screen gives you a series of those large desktop metapackages(KDE ...) and then three specific small subsets: web server (which currently installs Apache 2.*) ssh server - which installs openssh server - so you can SSH into a machine) and laptop which has various utilities primarily for laptops. > Are these not in the list in the recent Debian installers because they > don't fit nicely on one non-graphic-installer's screen? > The tasksel selection is metapackages - and not all of them. If you're doing software development, and install build-essential that will pull in a selection broadly equivalent to Software Development on Red Hat, for example. Hope this helps, Andy Cater.
