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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Nice to see recognition of what for many has long been obvious. I would go even further and say that the FreeBSD wannabe GUI install is not the way to go. Sure you can do a lot with it, but there are a lot of things that are counterintuitive like going back one screen (you have to click cancel). Contrast that with say, the OpenBSD installer. It's a breeze. I don't know what people are on about. Here you have an installer which asks you simple questions which have simple answers. For a long time before I ever tried a bsd, the opinion pieces I read about them scared me off (no graphical installer, yikes!). So I stayed with hold-your-hand suped-up installers like SuSE and never learned a thing about my system.
Then one day I felt daring and tried out OpenBSD. I found myself actually 'getting it' immediately. It wasn't scary. It was great. I was already learning stuff about the underlying system from the moment I started installing it. I never had that with a hold-your-hand linux distro.