|
Post by mikkh on May 5, 2013 12:21:24 GMT
.... OK it's the distro that launched a thousand clones then Debian 7 was released yesterday, a highly significant release because so many distros use it as their starting point - including the over hyped Ubuntu released late in 2004. The first Debian was fully a decade before that and many fine distros have used it as a stable building block to get their own visions started. Stability is the key word with releases roughly 2 years apart, so unlike the many clones which release at least twice a year, this really is a major happening in the Linux world. Having just downloaded it myself, time to find out what it can do...... Expect a review in the next few days
|
|
|
Post by mikkh on May 6, 2013 14:37:15 GMT
I chose the geeky text install because I'm a glutton for punishment and there are more options if you know what you're looking at, but a perfectly good graphical installer is supplied too.
It took about 15 minutes on my machine and once logged in I see 'iceweasel' (open source variant of Firefox (fire fox, ice weasel - oh how they laughed when they thought of that!)) It's basically Firefox though and accepts all Firefox add-ons
I was surprised to see 'adblockplus' already installed because it's not the Debian way to include things that aren't 100% stable or that haven't been tested for a long LONG time. So adblockplus has the Debian seal of approval - cool! I always install it anyway, because I can't abide adverts, so that's one less job to do.
The first test I do on any new Linux distro, is to check whether Flash is installed, it's deemed 'non free' (not open source) so some don't install it by default, which is quite annoying when you think at least half the internet needs it. Flash wasn't installed, instead there was 'Gnash' an open source alternative. Most alternatives to existing programs work perfectly well - 'Evince' is a more than adequate replacement for Adobe Acrobat Reader for example and about 100 times smaller. Two alternatives that don't really work at all are Gnash and 'Moonlight' an alternative to Microsoft's Silverlight, so I went looking for Flash immediately once I knew it wasn't installed.
It was easy to find in 'Synaptic' the software manager, so I installed it - took about 10 seconds to give me full access to the internet, well most of it because Linux uses the stable 11.2 version and you need to install Google Chrome to get the latest version - Chrome comes with the more up-to-date 11.7
First impressions? Well it's rock solid as I expected from Debian, but it's no wonder why all the clones exist, it's still a bit too geeky for it's own good and needs a bit of polish and user friendliness applied to make it accessible to the Linux newcomer.
Time to add the non-free Nvidia driver, that's always fun !!
|
|