[tde-users] Re: Trisquel/drop-in ubuntu replacement

said deloptes via tde-users: | Firstly it is amazing how internet is connecting same minded people. I, | personally, do not accept someone deciding for and not giving me a | choice. Secondly studying social behavior, scientists come to the | conclusion that the swarm intelligence builds up with time and exceeds | the individual intelligence, doesn't matter how intelligent one might | be. So, if most people find Debian useful, I think you should listen to | that. The reason I didn't use Debian when I switched from ) OS/2 to Linux 25 years and two months ago was that Debian was a pain in the ass to install and configure. Additionally, it was abundantly political. In those days, computing was like the early days of automobiles -- you were going to spend a certain amount of time with the thing up on the rack, but it was in service of driving the damn thing. Debian was at the time more for those who liked to work on their computers than for those who drove 'em. This was still the case some years later when after enduring RPM-based distros -- Caldera (yes!), Red Hat (4.2, then the ghastly 5.0), and SuSE (who knows) -- but now Ubuntu offered a DEB-based distro that was also relatively easy to install and configure. I wish I'd swallowed hard and switched to Debian then, taken my lumps then instead of now. But then as now, my computers are tools, the means to my ends. And then (less so now, I think), Debian was a kind of walled garden, as this Ubuntu spinoff is apparently. (Of course, we were all using KDE or Gnome as we waited for Rasterman to finish Enlightenment, the pinnacle of desktop achievement or so we were led to believe and just about impossible to configure.) Debian also went to some efforts to prevent "non-free" code from running. (They even banned KDE because of the Qt nonpurity.) If there were an *easy* way to jump to Debian I'd do it this afternoon. All I'd need is a way to generate a list of the things have installed, then tell Debian to install those. That's where the Trisquel thing kind of shines. I think I could jump to it pretty easily, but it wants to bring a lot of crap along, including vid drivers that just don't work as well as the OEM ones do. We have heard a lot about "free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer," but nothing about free as in using one's computer as he pleases. So we have Ubuntu and the People's Revolutionary Ubuntu Replacement. What we need is a good recipe to replace Ubuntu, which is fine but for Canonical's business plan, with Debian, which still breaks some stuff. As to the hive mind -- that must be why Debian is by far the leading Linux distribution, right? | For me most important is the stability and security and Debian is | excellent providing it - TDE on top and again - stability. This makes | the combination excellent for me. I have no doubt. Getting there is the problem. Which is why I need to keep looking. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/