Well, that's just it. To people who like it, so does debian. Debian also has an extremely simple method of installing software, which is totally tested and works - except when it doesen't. Most modern distributions have well-tested and comprehensive desktop tools that work perfectly - except when they don't.
So, for instance, here at work I commandeered a bunch of old computers with no drives that no one wanted anymore, and turned them into a diskless beowulf cluster for numerical analyses. To do this, I had to format a bunch of floppy disks, because the CMOS on the old boxes was too old for a network boot without media. So, I had to scrounge floppy disks, and the old disks here at work were full of bad sectors. Now, when I used the handy-dandy Gnome desktop format utility, 19 out of 20 disks would fail, due to the way it handled format checking - laying down the format, writing the filesystem, then read-checking every sector and dying if errors were found. Now, the windows format utility (formatting FAT32) has a default setting that labels bad sectors first, and avoids them. Linux will, of course, do this as well, but the option wasan't in the Gnome desktop took, and so in order to make it work, I was hunting through the man pages to find the appropriate switches. Now, this was just an example from this last weekend. There are an awful lot of things that "really work so much better," except when they don't.
On the other hand, Im not a really big distribution-sampler. I've used Debian, Red Hat, and SuSE, and simply have yet to see any release that can get down to 3% on the "have to break out the manual"-o-meter, which is about where windows sits, in my estimation.
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Date: 2006-01-09 07:41 pm (UTC)So, for instance, here at work I commandeered a bunch of old computers with no drives that no one wanted anymore, and turned them into a diskless beowulf cluster for numerical analyses. To do this, I had to format a bunch of floppy disks, because the CMOS on the old boxes was too old for a network boot without media. So, I had to scrounge floppy disks, and the old disks here at work were full of bad sectors. Now, when I used the handy-dandy Gnome desktop format utility, 19 out of 20 disks would fail, due to the way it handled format checking - laying down the format, writing the filesystem, then read-checking every sector and dying if errors were found. Now, the windows format utility (formatting FAT32) has a default setting that labels bad sectors first, and avoids them. Linux will, of course, do this as well, but the option wasan't in the Gnome desktop took, and so in order to make it work, I was hunting through the man pages to find the appropriate switches. Now, this was just an example from this last weekend. There are an awful lot of things that "really work so much better," except when they don't.
On the other hand, Im not a really big distribution-sampler. I've used Debian, Red Hat, and SuSE, and simply have yet to see any release that can get down to 3% on the "have to break out the manual"-o-meter, which is about where windows sits, in my estimation.