dasein wrote:Danielsan wrote:<blah blah blah>
I am almost agree with you but we have to separate facts from the opinions.
1) People mostly complain because hardware fail to work properly or because the DE are ugly.
hardware fail to work properly: this is not absolutely fault of Debian it depends by the hardware or by some binary firmware missing. Anyway is not fault of Debian or any other distro. Debian even if shipped with free-software provides non-free repositories and unofficial cd installation with binary driver as well. If your wifi card still continues to work improperly is not fault of debian, isn't it?
The DE is ugly: That's true, at least for Debian, but Debian collects upstream software with very few improvements (I remember the tragedy of the font renderings) eventually something is changing but the most is up to the devs, not even the maintainers. Can we blame Debian for it? I don't believe, Debian is the only distro that provides thousand of tested and patched packages is a huge task. Making Debian cool is up to the users, this is the deal.
2) The installer is hard to use.
Since Wheezy the installer did big improvement, and is easy to use and easy to understand. Probably is not fancy. What I dislike more is the fact that you have to wait until the end to confirm where install the MBR, if you could set up that at the beginning, after the first steps, you could do whatever you want during the installation. I don't believe the steps of the Debian Installer are really rational and in fact Ubuntu and Mint installer let you select where install the MBR at the beginning. However Debian Installer let you install the OS in a lot of architecture the others distros mostly I686/AMD64, we can deal with its behavior even if it is pretty annoying.
3) The installer is not sexy, the DE is not sexy, nothing is sexy at all.
Debian is not sexy at all. When a product is not commercial doesn't need to be sexy because don't need to sell itself. The other distros that try to be sexy are most of the time the ones with a narcissist people behind like Ubuntu, Mint and Elementary. The sexy distros have been trying to monetize its product with more or less success. Can we rely on sexy distro? No we don't, Ubuntu without Debian is nothing, doesn't matter snappy.
4) Why sexy distros?
Sexy distro should be avoid the spreading of stupid articles like the ones inside this thread but often miss their mission, why? Most people still have trouble to understand Debian.