On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 12:09:44PM +0200, Oded Arbel wrote:
> On Sunday, 6 בNovember 2005 09:32, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 08:05:03AM +0200, Aaron wrote:
>>> would I gain something from ubuntu?
>> I'd like to amplify Marc's answer. Ubuntu is sort of the "Windows"
>> of Linux.
>> I assume most people on this list have installed Windows at one
>> time or another and are familar with its instalation. You boot from
>> a CD, put in a "magic number" answer a few questions and an hour
>> later you have a working system without a clue of how it got there.
> Something which will be new and surprising only to Debian users.
I'd like to gently point out that the Debian installer (used from
sarge (3.1) on) works in much the same way, except for the "magic
number". After all, the installer Ubuntu uses is ... the Debian
installer, barely customised.
Unless you switch it in "expert" mode, here's how it goes as far as I
remember:
- Boot on CD. Says "Press Enter to continue or F1 for help on other
options". You press enter.
- Asks you what language you want the installation to proceed in
(Hebrew is in the list, but I dunno if everything is translated).
- Asks you in what country ("or other region / territory of special
interest") you are, showing you only countries in which the chosen
language is spoken and an entry "other" to get the full list.
- Asks you whether it can take your whole disk, erase what may be on
it and continue automatically. Let's suppose you say yes.
- It gives you a few checkboxes to check or not, like "Desktop
system", "Printing Server", "File Server", "Web Server", "Laptop",
...
- It asks you a few more questions like the full name / login /
password for a non-root user, the root password, ...
> I'm not saying Ubuntu isn't a nice distro, but it is a far cry from
> ground-breaking or anything. I personally have tried a previous
> version (05.something) and didn't much like it - I think they make
> the classic GNOME mistake of hiding important and useful end-user
> (i.e. not power-user) features - to the point where its impossible
> to find w/o going to the mailing lists and messing around with
> registry-style configurations programs and/or editing text files -
> and then calling it "usability improvements".
They inherit these bugs from Gnome 2.
> That being said, as for GNOME, people who only want the very narrow
> feature set that Ubuntu provides (only GNOME for example ;-) ) will
> find it an enjoyable experience.
(Note that while KDE is not on the CD, I'm fairly sure it is on the
on-line repository of additional packages.)
> Kubuntu OTOH (which I haven't tried) should be nice if you want a
> simple Debian based distro for a powerful Linux desktop.
KDE is IMHO inappropriate for the title of "good desktop for Unixy OS"
for another set of reasons; the worst is that they refuse to integrate
with the rest of the Unixy OS; for example, in matters around
internationalisation, which leads - far too often - for people to have
a desktop in mixed languages, where KDE apps speak one language and
non-KDE apps another. I consider this a critical bug.
--
Lionel
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