On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 18:59:45 +0530, Kumar Appaiah said:

Dear Linuxers, This is a nice article about how the Debian project has tried to "redefine" itself with Etch:

http://distrocenter.linux.com/distrocenter/07/04/13/1231226.shtml?tid=106

Interesting. I was not aware that any redefinition has been going on. And the philosophy of the Debian desktop subproject, despte what the article implies, is not really the philosophy of the project at large.

I also find it strange that the author thinks that Debian is orienting itself any differently that before -- the focus on non-novices has always been the case since most people like to create software that works for oneself as well -- and most debian developers are not what one would classify as novices. So the positioning of the installer for developers is the natural course of events -- the novice friendliness is what effort has been put into by some people.

I suppose, from the article, that the novice orientation some people were trying to push has not been successful, to the extent that the author thinks it was a deliberate decision not to be friendlier :)

Also, is the Ubuntu installer really that different from what Etch uses? How come every reviewer raves about the former, if the difference is so minimal?

But, still, an interesting article, and one I had not seen before. Thanks.

manoj