Updates

[Harry Kuhman]

You have looked at Debian more recently than five or six years ago, right?

When I first got involved with Knoppix, Debian was indeed a lot of work to install. I consider myself pretty technical, and I took what I thought were good notes on the system that I was intending to install Debian on, yet I would still have to abort the install and go back and look at some some obscure piece of information to restart and complete the install. Knoppix impressed a lot of people because it "just worked", it showed that this stuff could be determined at install or boot time rather than making the installer go through a hardware engineer final exam. People asked Klaus for a way to install it and he did accommodate, but cautioned that because Knoppix was a mix of different Debian versions an "install" was not suitable for most users. People complained if Knoppix can "kist work" them why can other versions of Linux.

Debian and others learned from Knoppix and a Debian install is much cleaner now. I'm really not sure what you are complaining about. Sure, there are still some choices, like which version of Debian to use, and if you want a desktop or server environment, and which desktop to use and so on, but they are not tough choices, particularly if you have used a Live CD like Knoppix to aquatint yourself with Linux. You do have to install the packages that you want, but each is as simple as a single command line entry, and you don't end up with hundreds of applications that you will never use and you can choose from thousands more not included in Knoppix.

Personally I wouldn't suggest Debian Stable unless you were installing a mission critical server system. I've found Debian Testing to be as stable and have access to much newer tools. But that is just another choice one gets to make when installing Debian.

I guess one could easily write a script that would install the packages that Knoppix includes so that you could install everything in one burst. Walk away and come back to a very Knoppix like setup. But I wouldn't want to do that, it just adds too much bloat to the average system; bloat that is fine when filling space on a live DVD but pointless when setting up a hard disk system.

So you may very well know what you are talking about. I just don't know if the rest of us do and I certainly don't know what you think is so hard about installing Debian. And I say this as someone who has installed Debian to hard disk many times. I've never tried to install Knoppix to hard disk. I have tried to install it to flash, but never with satisfactory results.

[jalb]

I used Debian many years ago during some time, I am from those times with debian/freebsd/openbsd/qnx/oracle/... and if I want to install some operative system in my computer I prefer Openbsd. But with livecds in my usb pen drive to use in many different computers and in my job with my VPN and Tor, I don't want to install everything from 0, I only want to use it as antivirus to analyze some computers (I downloaded Bitdefender free for 1 year to Unix), as an easy way to read my emails and browse when I have some time, etc...; but as i read in your answer maybe Debian has changed a lot (I remember when I was working many hours/days to setup this o.s. some years ago).

You have looked at Debian more recently than five or six years ago, right? ...

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