this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.
Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.
So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.
UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.
UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.
Have people installed Debian since Debian 12? The installer is very straight forward, and Debian 12 also comes with all the firmware modules to make things "just work" for people.
I would like to know exactly what Debian does wrong other than a blanket statement of "it's hard".
As a supposed technical person, I am ashamed of myself of how long it took me to download the ISO for my VM. Its like 7clicks from homepage into increasingly more information rich site to get their full iso. Originally I browsed through a bunch of pages before realising where it was.
TBF their netinstall iso is available in just two clicks but I was too stuborn to get the full iso.
I definitely agree their website needs work, it is very confusing to browse if you need anything other than the net installer! I find everything else by using search engines instead.