I find the presentation of diversity in purely competitive terms tedious. Debian loses the installer game! Debian wins the update game! Every distro doesn’t need, nor should they have to try, to be best at everything. That’s the point. It’s unfortunate that so many pundits stick with this tried-and-true storyline, rather than trying to present truly insightful commentary on the tech world.

Quote: “but getting to them can be a chore, and you’re pretty much on your own to find what’s available and how to get it.”

Squeeze has the exact same software center as ubuntu, just in the administration menu. It’s not hard to find applications at all, or maybe you didn’t bother to look.

“Dumb” users do not have to install Debian, they can ask some one else to do that for them or they can use Ubuntu or other friendly Linux distor.

Yes, Debian still lags the most “easy to use” distributions in asking a few too many questions, but I found a significant improvement between Lenny and Squeeze, to the point that the questions and the flow are nowhere near as annoying as they have been in recent releases.

Until Etch, the procedure, at least to me, was terrible. Etch added an easier procedure, but not a very streamlined one. Lenny made it easier, but it still needed more streamlining. I feel that Squeeze did a better job yet. Is there still room for further improvement? I’d say yes, but I think at last they are “getting there”. Perhaps it is still not for a beginner who can’t read or who can’t study to learn terminology, but I feel that it has been significantly improved for three major releases in a row, and on the Debian project, where the installer has always been one of the big weak points, to me that is significant progress.

I’ll have to add that I never had a problem with Debian’s text based installer. I’ve had far more trouble with graphical based ones. In fact I’ll go as far as to say I hate the graphical installers. I always opt for the alternative installer on Ubuntu it’s faster and sensible. Recently tried Fedora 13 – horrible install process – that ended in something unbootable. I couldn’t get my Fedora to install in text mode. Perhaps I had the wrong type of install disc – groan.

I had an issue with booting off and installing from USB with squeeze – I got around it, but it wasn’t totally intuitive – it should be!

On the subject of installers, I do like the idea of unmanned installation. Being able to answer questions up front then walk away. Some distros, prompts you somewhere in the middle of the install process – and it’s left hanging (Horrible – reminds me of windows.)

You should be able to even do a headless install!

Long live text based installers!

Download a copy of Debian v1.0, install it, with a graphical environment, and then report back.

As preamble: I am one of the developers of the Debian Installer. As member of the D-I team since 2003, I mostly focused on i18n and localization (have you seen how many languages you can install in?). I have also always been interested in usability (being a not-so-technical person, that’s kind of logical).

So, there are about 20 questions to answer for a default install, Joe. You’re right (or you are probably right…it’s been quite some time since I counted and that, anyway, depends on what you install).

But, have you noticed that you can indeed install Debian by just hitting Enter 20 times (with one exception)? *All* defaults are safe defaults. And the only exception is precisely being safe : you are requested to answer “Yes” when you apply partitioning changes..while the default is “No”.

Usability has always been a target for D-I developers. As I wrote many times already, we mostly target D-I to someone we call “Joe User” (no kidding) : a person somehow intereste din computers, able to understand very basic jargon (what is a partition, what is an operating system, etc.). I still think we’re doing pretty good job in this.

Sure, we ask several things during install; But most of these are quite easy to understand: language, country, keymap, network settings (default being “just do DHCP, dude”) , user password and creation, way to partition, timezone (only if you live in a country with multiple timezones), what to install…and bootloader stuff.

Really, for something as versatile as D-I is, I don’t think we can do much better.

You suggested to group things together. However, this is not as easy and trivial as it seems. Let’s take the language/country/keymap trilogy as an example. If I choose “French”, I’d prefer being prompted about French-speaking countries…and not a huge list of 250 countries…but, I’d still like to be able to choose Antarctica is I happen to live with penguins (or to be one: some penguins do speak French). Then, if I stupidly choose “France” as country, I’d prefer seeing the (weird) keymaps we, stupid french dudes, are using. Etc.

All this can be done sequentially, indeed. This is why you get several questions, one after each other.

We did our best to *group* these questions together, as much as possible. However, given the fine-grained nature of the installer (it is also designed to run in low-memory environments), there are trade-offs in this.

More generally speaking, I think we’re doing quite well….for a team of less than 5 people who are doing all this thing on their spare time. Well enough indeed, for Ubuntu to use Debian Installer as their “alternate” installer (the one for people who really want to control how they install their machine).

And, in case you’re still not convinced about this, please try to once see our “Babelbox” : a neat demo of Debian Installer that just runs Debian installs over and over in nearly 70 different languages. That one is a killer demo for booths at exhibitions. More details on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/BabelBox

Thanks to everybody who commented, by the way. Your encouragements, folks, are our best motivation to continue. And thanks, Joe, for this great feedback, anyway!

I’ll believe it when I can do it. For now, Ubuntu 10.04 works.