Monday, September 5

Goodbye Slackware

One of the first things I've done with my newfound freedom since leaving Reflections is to review all my Linux installs. For a long time I've been soldiering on with the redoubtable Slackware. However, I resolved to give Debian a try, and frankly I'm amazed by what I've seen. Compared to Slackware install was fast, friendly and trouble-free: network, video, and sound were all auto-detected, and the graphical login came up first time.


Gnome is gorgeous, too, all point and click and "just works". Even this post came straight from the desktop blogging tool, rather than via Firefox.

Every time I revisit a mainstream distro, I'm amazed by the progress. Frankly, if something like this came pre-installed, damn few people would touch a Windows PC. Mind you, Steve Jobs has probably recently come to the same conclusion, so there maybe hope, yet...meanwhile, it's back to my Lisp rendering follies, I guess.

3 comments:

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John Connors said...

The trouble with the word verification thing is that it isn't accessible; it gives problems to partially-sighted people who use screen readers. That said, the spammers pretty much force you to use it if the comments are to be useful.

I don't think the blog tool has any specific name: Synaptic (the graphical package manager that comes with Debian, another thing I'm heavily impressed by) just calls it gnome-blog. It's about as minimalistic as it could possibly be.