Linked by Paul Hankes Drielsma on Tue 15th Apr 2003 06:40 UTC
I can't take anymore comments like "Debian/Gentoo/OpenBSD/etc. are not good/user-friendly because they lack a graphical installer." Searching the web, I couldn't find a comprehensive site describing the good and the bad about graphical installers for various OSes throughout the years, so in this article I hope to debunk a few of the myths on the basis of my own personal and professional experience.
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Flawless article Paul. It is about time someone said "Enough is enough!" People bash text installers far too often. The ones I see the most frequently bashed are Gentoo and Debian. You know, people have discussed this a lot in the Gentoo forums and I'm sure the Debian forums as well. I really don't think most of the users of these systems even want a graphical installer. Designing an intuitive, yet flexible graphical installer is difficult. Chances are it will need some updating for all major releases and it will pull human time and resources away from other, more important things.
This goes doubly for systems like Debian, Gentoo, and (I believe) FreeBSD where you really do just install once and update everything else through apt/portage/ports.