you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 19 points 7 months ago (6 children)

The reason you've never tried it before is probably that they only recently made an effort to make it palatable for the average nerd. It always had a bit of a reputation of being not easy to work with.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    It's been fine for the average nerd for a couple decades. The installer has been mostly unchanged since 2005 or so, and I don't see much difference in an installed system either. I think you can live boot it ahead of installation now, maybe that's a big deal to some people?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The biggest deal was including non-free firmware on the install media.
    In the past, if you used the official ISO and started the installation, it would format your disk and then inform you that it can't connect to your Wi-Fi to download additional software.
    Then it would install the semi-complete bare-bones system that fit on one install disc and boot you into a desktop with no network configuration.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, I forgot about that. Yes, that's a pretty big deal. Thanks for pointing that out. Debian have always been pretty purist about non-free software, to the detriment of new users.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    To be fair, back then Ubuntu was basically just "Debian preconfigured for desktop with a check-box in the installer to include non-free stuff".
    Debian today feels like old Ubuntu, and Ubuntu today feels like a distro made by a corporation desperately trying to enshittify Linux.

  • source
  • parent