Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 14th Apr 2007 18:43 UTC, submitted by deanlinkous
"For much of its history, Debian has been the major noncommercial, philosophically free distribution. Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu, does Debian have a purpose any more? Debian 4.0, which was released this week, represents a collective effort to answer that question. The philosophy behind the release is best summarized on the home page for the Debian on the Desktop subproject, which states, 'We will do everything we can to make things very easy for the novice, while allowing the expert to tweak things'."
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Member since:
2005-09-25
Recently, the goal of many distributions seems to have become to be a free version of Windows for users without much understanding of their operating system. Debian counters that trend. Instead of accepting that users prefer to be ignorant, Debian 4.0 treats users as students -- as people who may initially lack knowledge, but who are capable of learning. It's a bold approach, and one that's needed badly enough that Debian may just have found a new purpose -- and, with it, a guarantee of its survival.
It's a little strange that aiming at the computer-literate is now considered a 'bold approach' for a linux distribution to take, but I'm glad that Debian are taking that approach all the same.
I've found Debian a joy to use on the desktop - a nice balance of power, reliability and freedom to choose how cutting-edge you want to run; personally, I pointed my sources at testing and got myself off the 6-month reinstallation treadmill of some of the other distributions.