[2002-06-05]
Everyone in my LUG, pretty much, uses Debian. Here's a rant I've just
posted to the mailing list:
It's because of the debian users that I don't use debian.
I don't mean that in a bad way at all; I think debian users are great. But
you guys *keep pimping the wrong thing*
A while ago, when I decided to dump RedHat [when 7.0 came out], I started
looking for a new distribution. After trying several, the options were
pretty clear; Debian, Slack, or LFS [given my requirements at the time].
Slack seemed the nice, clean choice [and everyone I know online uses
it], and debian... well, the debian people kept telling me how great
debian is "because it's free /a la/ free, as well as free /a la/
speech".
I don't care.
I don't use linux because I believe all software should be free. I
use linux because I think it's cool, and it does what I want.
I clearly don't seriously care about free-as-in-free given I posess
most of the commercial games out there, I have a graphics card for which
there will probably never be free-as-in-free drivers, and I use opera.
If you guys had merely pimped the package management system, and the
security stuff [until the last LUG meeting, I didn't even know that
debian had a security update thing at all], I would most probably be
using it by now.
You also did't tell me about dist-upgrade, which would [for me] probably
have been the single, big, selling point. [this is before I really cared
about security]
Noticing also, as Ewan said, that if you install a redhat box but
leave out Netscape 4, or if you install Slack the same, or any number
of other distributions, then your box is essentially
debian-free-as-in-free. Which a lot of you guys seem to miss.
I /now/ know all of the "this is why you should use debian stuff", and
if anyone had told me about it ages ago, I'd be using it.
Most noticably, Roger, the other week while we were wandering
someplace, you were telling me how great debian is because of the
free thing. You're a package maintainer. You, as much as anyone,
should be telling us how great /that/ is.
At this point, you're probably saying "but some people really do care
about free-as-in-debian-free". That's fine.
All of those people already use debian, because it's the only one that
claims to be free-as-in-free. I'm sure there are some new people
coming along periodically who really do care, but I can't imagine it
being half as often as RMS and friends would like it to be.
[note: old plan entries are all avilable at
http://icculus.org/~chunky/oldplan]