[UFO Chicago] Re: Brian's Conversion from FreeBSD to Debian and Questions on X

[Jesse Becker]

--- Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:
> 1) (K)Ubuntu: Good for "it just works, I don't want t
> deal with setting the damned thing up" users.  That 

Except, that in Brian's case, it *didn't* work. :)

> 3) Free vs. Non-Free.  Uh, how is this a problem in

I think that the problem is many users don't understand the
distinction.  The same folks who want it to "just work"
probably not going to care much about distinction the
free/non-free packages in Debian.  So long as you don't
have to actually *pay* for it, they consider it "free." 
IMO, this is not actually Debian's fault, as it's a
cultural thing.  Personally, I find it annoying but not a
problem (just add the non-free stuff to your sources file),
and I'm all for Debian attempting to educate the public.


> 4) If you're using Debian and apt-get, you're doing it

Noted.  Next time I have to use a Debian system, I'll do
that.


> If you want to complain about the FHS, why are programs
> still putting everything into ~/.program ?  That makes
the
> home directory nearly useless, hidden files or no.  Why 
> aren't we using ~/etc/program yet?  

Actually, I *LIKE* having $HOME/.program/ (as opposed to
$HOME/.programrc).  The reason for config files in ~ is so
that a user can override the system defaults if they
choose.  On multi-user systems, this is critical; on a
single user system, not so much.  Regarding a directory
instead of a single file, I'd rather have a single
$HOME/.program directory with mutliple files underneath,
than have several ~/.prgramrc files for one application.


Jesse Becker
GPG-fingerprint:  BD00 7AA4 4483 AFCC 82D0  2720 0083 0931 9A2B 06A2

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