Debian feels like having to remove panel, short th[SOLVED]
Posted: 2016-05-24 19:28
I hope that this will lead to a constructive debate, and not just flaming...
Is it just me, or does Debian feel like it just has "presets" and if you want to do something but the most ordinary, you have to go "under the hood"?
Compare to a washing machine, that has a few functions on the panel - 1:wool, 2:cotton white, and 3:cotton colour, which gives 1: gentle wash, 30 deg.C. no spin-dry. 2: normal wash, 60 C, full speed spin dry. 3: normal wash, 40 C, full speed spin-dry.
If you have clothes that require, say 60 C but a lower spin speed, you have to consult the Internet on how to remove the cover, disconnect a few wires, connect them together and/or to other connectors, re-assemble the machine and press start.
The next time you want to wash according to a standard program, you have no idea if the machine will run that program, the same "program" as the re-wiring did, or something completely different.
I have only used Microsoft Windows and DOS before I tried Debian, and I hope there are others both with that background and others who want to share their experiences and so.
I got tired of Microsoft for privacy reasons - no full disk encryption worth trusting, no transparency, shady embedded stuff called "nsakey", etc. and now they just keep getting worse with the Windows 10 upgrade crap. MS is not to be trusted...
So I installed Debian, and took some time to try to learn it. After all, that's how I learned Windows once upon a time. The first thing that happened was that the screen flickered in uneven intervals - I found the answer somewhere, it was something with a watchdog, and I ran a command that was recommended, and it worked. I do not remember what it was, where I found it (I tried searching again), or anything.
Then I wanted to turn off the function corresponding to mouse acceleration, or "improve pointer precision" as it's called in MS Win. There was no such checkbox in the mouse settings of Debian. I had to search again, found a program to install - oh, how do you install programs? With code in the prompt...
That taken care of, and a whole lot of privacy settings, including a VPN service, later, I felt secure enough to watch YouTube.
No Flash Player that worked. An old version of Gnash that didn't support YouTube.
So: Find out what "backports" are, start GEdit from a superuser prompt in order to be able to alter a text file - sources.list - in order to be able to run a special command that took me days to find out (with the help of you here on Debian Forums - thanks). Got error message! More days to find out what to do about it, having no idea what I was doing, and finally got it to work.
Problems keeping on coming up in the same way, with different things, over and over again.
And now it's time again, Gnash does no longer work on YouTube.
Do you see what I want to say? Debian is free, so it's not like there is a responsibility anywhere, but I thought the general idea was to make something useful for most people, not just the lightest users that write simple text files, and the experts who know all the necessary tricks.
I wouldn't take a washing machine like the one in the example for free, even if it made my clothes twice as clean and last three times as long, if I could buy one that I can actually set to the correct temperature, program type and spin speed from the panel, even if it is expensive.
However, I value my privacy higher than my laundry, so I try to continue with Debian...
Is it just me, or does Debian feel like it just has "presets" and if you want to do something but the most ordinary, you have to go "under the hood"?
Compare to a washing machine, that has a few functions on the panel - 1:wool, 2:cotton white, and 3:cotton colour, which gives 1: gentle wash, 30 deg.C. no spin-dry. 2: normal wash, 60 C, full speed spin dry. 3: normal wash, 40 C, full speed spin-dry.
If you have clothes that require, say 60 C but a lower spin speed, you have to consult the Internet on how to remove the cover, disconnect a few wires, connect them together and/or to other connectors, re-assemble the machine and press start.
The next time you want to wash according to a standard program, you have no idea if the machine will run that program, the same "program" as the re-wiring did, or something completely different.
I have only used Microsoft Windows and DOS before I tried Debian, and I hope there are others both with that background and others who want to share their experiences and so.
I got tired of Microsoft for privacy reasons - no full disk encryption worth trusting, no transparency, shady embedded stuff called "nsakey", etc. and now they just keep getting worse with the Windows 10 upgrade crap. MS is not to be trusted...
So I installed Debian, and took some time to try to learn it. After all, that's how I learned Windows once upon a time. The first thing that happened was that the screen flickered in uneven intervals - I found the answer somewhere, it was something with a watchdog, and I ran a command that was recommended, and it worked. I do not remember what it was, where I found it (I tried searching again), or anything.
Then I wanted to turn off the function corresponding to mouse acceleration, or "improve pointer precision" as it's called in MS Win. There was no such checkbox in the mouse settings of Debian. I had to search again, found a program to install - oh, how do you install programs? With code in the prompt...
That taken care of, and a whole lot of privacy settings, including a VPN service, later, I felt secure enough to watch YouTube.
No Flash Player that worked. An old version of Gnash that didn't support YouTube.
So: Find out what "backports" are, start GEdit from a superuser prompt in order to be able to alter a text file - sources.list - in order to be able to run a special command that took me days to find out (with the help of you here on Debian Forums - thanks). Got error message! More days to find out what to do about it, having no idea what I was doing, and finally got it to work.
Problems keeping on coming up in the same way, with different things, over and over again.
And now it's time again, Gnash does no longer work on YouTube.
Do you see what I want to say? Debian is free, so it's not like there is a responsibility anywhere, but I thought the general idea was to make something useful for most people, not just the lightest users that write simple text files, and the experts who know all the necessary tricks.
I wouldn't take a washing machine like the one in the example for free, even if it made my clothes twice as clean and last three times as long, if I could buy one that I can actually set to the correct temperature, program type and spin speed from the panel, even if it is expensive.
However, I value my privacy higher than my laundry, so I try to continue with Debian...