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05/09/2004: "Debian Linux ..."

I've been considering rebuilding my broken beige G3 Macintosh and since I no longer have a handy licensed copy of OS X to install on it, I thought I'd slap on some PowerPC flavour of Linux...

Debian promises to work on PowerPC.

Ah-hah, I think. That's the very job for me. Now I'll just download an ISO image, burn a CD and away we go.

But noooooooo..... Debian prefers you to download your files using a command line tool which builds the ISO image from individual files that it downloads. A command line tool that's not the straightforwardest to run, and for which you need to know things like which mirror you will be downloading from, the name of the .jingo source file for the appropriate ISO image, etc. etc.

None of this is particularly hard - it's a matter of 5 or 10 minutes reading of the web-site, and a little searching.

But, for 's sake... why? The Debian site tells us that doing it this way is quicker and places less load on their servers. Well, my experience so far, has been that it's tremendously slow. Not because of the transfer speed.... I'm getting more or less full 50KB/s via ADSL. No, because it's downloading little chunks at a time and assembling them into an ISO. Many many many hours per individual ISO image.

It's alienating and not at all user friendly. This is a Windows app, but runs in a DOS command line window - there's no reason why a little user-friendly GUI couldn't be tacked on. The prompts in the jigdo window are unhelpful, etc.

No doubt a Debian evangelist can give me chapter and verse on why using jigdo makes sense and I have no doubt apparently pressing technical reasons exist --- or at least someone who has invested a significant part of their time and self-image in developing an intimate understanding of Debian install procedures could probably manufacture a reason that I couldn't be bothered to invest the time and effort to prove or disprove... But if your aim is to make the installation of your software user friendly and to attract ordinary users --- this is is an utter failure. It takes the best part of a day to download and assemble the necessary ISO files and the process is profoundly unfriendly.

I'm used to command lines. My professional experience with PCs predates the widespread use of Microsoft Windows, I've worked (for actual folding money) with various flavours of Unix including Solaris, Linux and OS X, I write my academic work in LaTeX and I prefer Emacs over Microsoft Word --- by any usual standard I'm at the upper end of technical knowledge for an ordinary PC user. However, I found the ISO download process unecessarily fiddly --- it's not difficult, it just ought to be easier. Some ordinary punter interested in switching would never get that far. They'd either stick to Windows or go download from some other flavour of Linux that makes the process easier.

Replies: 2 Comments

I wouldn't use Jigdo myself - but the CD images are still right there to be downloaded.

I agree that ordinary punters wouldn't get through a current debian install. That's for the best, with Debian in its current condition (matchless for the experienced, useless for the clueless). Friendliness for new users is being thought about, but it's still not high up the list - because Debian is a cooperative made up of people who are not new.

rfb said @ 05/16/2004 12:35 PM GMT

Yeah, the images were there but the site was fairly clear that they prefer you to use jigdo. It's also implied (heabily) that using jigdo is faster than just downloading the images. Which it isn't.

I get your point re: lack of user friendliness. There's room for at least one Linux distro that assumes some level of competence.

Matt said @ 05/18/2004 05:17 PM GMT

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