OSNews

"about the appropriateness of stable for enterprise desktops. It may reduce admin workload, but everyone I know would run screaminng in horror from stable on their office desktop. They'd refuse to use it."

Provided that they are able to provide the staff with the necessary functionality to get their typing/email/web browsing done, it's up to the IT department to decide what distribution the workstations will run. And the IT support staff will obviously be inclined to opt for something that makes *their* jobs so much easier - that's just human nature. Even if they really must opt for backports to get some piece of extra functionality, or eyecandy (which is sadly how most end-users seem to judge software quality) it's still a joy maintenance-wise compared to other distributions. Lol - but fair enough, I accept that not everyone will see it that way. :-)

"But, the implication of what you're saying is that progress in the x86 arena -- where most of the world lives -- is artificially constrained to assure consistency across all platforms."

No, not at all. It's simply that the Debian project cannot afford to have a different installer for every port. Not only would it be monstrously inefficient due to duplication of effort (and thus a waste of developer time), it would mean that the users would have to master a different install procedure for each port.

And who's "constraining" you? AIUI, you'll be able to apt-get Progeny's creation from the archive, whereupon it'll generate install images for you automatically. After that, you can freely redistribute them if you so wish. In addition, although it was not mentioned in the announcement, I suspect that Progeny will have some install images available on their site, as they did for their old installer, PGI.