Linked by David Adams on Fri 26th Sep 2008 20:22 UTC, submitted by Caffeine Deprived
This article takes a look at five great but not very well-known desktop-focussed Linux distros, including SimplyMEPIS and Mint. It focuses on distros that are easy-to-use.
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Member since:
2006-01-10
Debian still has this silly reputation from before Woody when the installer required you to know every bit of hardware you had and still supported Floppy install. I think Etch was the first to not have a Floppy install, but Woody had a semi-decent installer and Sarge had an excellent one (all the earlier Ubuntu releases used the same installer and so do the Alternate and Server releases)
Debian is just as easy, if not easier than Ubuntu to install. In fact I think it's better because it doesn't use different installers depending on what you want to install. You want to install just the server, do it with the tasksel package that is ran during installation. You want a desktop? It's there as well. Web server? Easy. LVM and Raid? It's all there too.
I think Ubuntu is doing a disservice to their users by not using the Debian installer as their desktop installer when you try "Install Ubuntu" from the initial menu, or even maybe integrate it into the LiveCD. Hardy's installer even had a really annoying bug on the timezone selection screen that makes the map almost unusable. On an LTS release? Even the .1 release of it didn't fix the issue. It moves just way too fast.
The only downfall of Debian, which was supposed to be the one thing that Ubuntu was created to fix, was old releases of Gnome. But I do find that a Debian release usually has newer versions of the backend / server side software, but older versions of the Desktop stuff. That's the real reason to use Ubuntu over Debian. It certainly has nothing to do with ease of installation.
With Debian you'll need a single CD to install either x86, x86_64, or PPC. Lenny has a netinst with those architectures. That pretty much covers most computers out there right now.
Plus from what I can tell (couldn't get it working yet myself) Debian Lenny will finally support multi-arch packaging. I don't know if Ubuntu will have that until 9.04.
Anyhow just a rant to back you up on the myth of difficult installations for Debian. An old Myth that is at least older than Woody (released in 2002)