Questioning the mentality of Debian purists with regards to the spurning of Linux Mint Debian Edition.?
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 at
19:25
It is quite understandable why there is noise from the Debian purists about Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros. but Linux Mint Debian Edition surely they are spurning their own ‘The Wonderful World Of Linux Politics’
Your thoughts ?
Tagged with: distros • Linux • mint • purists • ubuntu • wonderful world
Filed under: Debian
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I don’t think it matters because if the people at Debian don’t cut the crap, they won’t be around for long. Computing and Linux itself has changed A LOT the last couple years. I ran Debian for a long time, I figured "why run the rip-off, when you can run the real thing" I still have that mindset to a degree. But the reality is if there not going to put together a distro that can be installed and USED without hours of screwing around with it they’ll seal there fate. I’m all about OSS, but unless hardware mfg’s open source then proprietary drivers are needed, plain and simple. Especially when it comes to Video Cards and many wireless cards. I can’t speak for everybody but I have much better luck with the actual Adobe Flash & Plugins than I do the OSS ones, same goes for Java. Debian proved to me they were out of their minds when they replaced Firefox with IceWeasel because the crash reporter had a trademarked icon in it. I don’t know how much Deb or Ian have to do with it these days or if there even part of it anymore but they gotta update, They JUST got a GUI installer in the current version! REALLY? I don’t know that I’d never run it again, but they can expect to never get noobs who just want to use their computer. Linux has changed, it’s not just for hackers and computer nerds and hasn’t been for a while they need to accept that. I like the Idea of LMDE, The strength of Debian with the usability of Mint. That will probably be how Mint goes in the future in place of just adding menus and codecs to Ubuntu and calling it there own.
Mint Debian is the next Ubuntu, now that Ubuntu has gone off the deep end. This is assuming Clem finds competent help in developing it. Can you imagine Mint’s tiny team serving a community as large as Ubuntu’s? It’s inhuman as it is, the stellar OS they put out for what seems to be the whiniest userbase of any distro (read the blog comments). Everyone has a completely uninformed, kneejerk opinion in the Linux world, so I just ignore the average user’s crankiness. I doubt it’s Debian purists who object to LMDE, more like Debian posers who think an OS is a status symbol. Ignore them. Mint Debian does need a bit of refinement –at least it did when a tried it a few months ago– but I feel it’s the future. We’ll even get used to Gnome 3 somehow…we’ll have to, and it’s improving every day from what I can tell, though I don’t use it.
Think of the whiners switching to XFCE because they don’t like Gnome 3, or the huge hissy fit that erupted when KDE 4 was released. I sit in bemused observation of every supposed crisis. The open source community mostly consists of reasonable and knowledgeable people, it’s the newcomers to Linux that form factions and are demanding; the same ones who throw a fit about every little bug but have never filed a bug report, and if they did file a bug report it would be more nonconstructive b1tching anyway. Don’t even take them seriously.