Debian Sarge Quick First Impressions

Installed Debian Sarge on my little sister's computer last night after her windows died.. A few observations..

1. wow, debian net install was easier than the last time I installed mandrake


2. It's a bit tightly tied to GNOME.. I'd have preferred a n easy tway to switch to something lighter


3. on the other hand, doing an apt-get install [application] automatically puts an item in your gnome start menu thing, which is great


4. The Debian net-install also cures my other major complaint about Linux usability: the tendency to throw every possible package into a distro, so you get 6 mail programs, web browsers, 5 window managers and no way to know which is the best one with a typical install of something like Suse.


5. I like Debian's totally non-commercial nature. No tricking you to sign up for for-pay upgrade services or support, nothing in your face whe nyou start the thing. Just a nice, working operating system.


6. X installation was relatively simple. It did ask what the manufacturer of the video card was, not something a Joe User would know. But that was it, much better than the last time I installed Linux and had to remember how much video RAM I had and what the maximum horizontal and vertical synch rates of my monitor were.


7. The desktop system still installs all the usual Linux crap, because you never know when you might want to run your own mail server, apparently.

We'll see if it passes the little sister test finally. She's got her Hotmail and her MSN, that should be all she would need for now, and all that ever really worked reliably under Win98 lately in the first place.