Debian is a great distro for many kinds of people such as those concerned about free licensing (free as in freedom), those who have unusual architectures (such as PowerPC), those who run a server, those who want stability, those who prefer rolling releases, and those who a high level of Linux skill. It is not good for those who have low or medium skill levels, those who do not like the commandline (most help comes via commandline and power users), and those with proprietary hardware (most users, sadly).
Debian has a large user base and lots of online help. Most of it is from advanced users who will give you advice that requires you to drop to the commandline and edit config files in your root file system. It also comes with proprietary blobs stripped from the kernel. The Linux kernel is developed separately and it includes drivers from many proprietary OEMs. This is not acceptable to the Debian rulers.
Debian is a bit of a dictatorship where insiders control everything and ordinary users get little or no input. It does not take much to tick them off. They have had a running feud with Mozilla, for example over trade marks, to the extent that they have forked the work of Mozilla and re-branded it. Nobody appears to have the same problems that Debian manages to find itself in. Take that for what you will. On the positive side, Debian is good at mentoring, if you pass the litmus test and buy into their ideology.
My own experience with Debian has declined over the years. I used to use it. I ran into problems after they made changes to the distribution. I could not get it to work with my ethernet card which is essential to installing and upgrading. The advice from Debian was that my Realtek card was proprietary so buy a new card. It is a plain vanilla card that works with every known distribution and operating system on the planet. My response was to uninstall Debian and never go back. I don't like people who refuse to help. Debian has become more about the ideology and less about helping people to the point where I came to wonder what was the point of having an operating system or computers without people. Shouldn't people be your first concern? How can you separate the two?
My advice without knowing you or your aging laptop is to pass on Debian. You are likely to run into many driver issues and get little or no help.
Roy
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 9:19 PM, "relztrah@yahoo.com [LINUX_Newbies]" <LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
My wife just got a new laptop for her birthday and I'll get her old Acer laptop with an ADM C-50 processor running at 1 GHz and 8 GB of RAM.
I have been using Puppy (Tahrpup) for a couple years on an very old IBM Thinkpad and really like Puppy, and it runs great on this jalopy. But I imagine that the Acer can handle a more robust distro. I did one of those online distro chooser surveys, and Debian came out as the best choice for me since I want stability and don't do any tinkering under the hood. Will the latest release of Debian run on this Acer given its configuration? I don't do any high-end operations like video editing or gaming. Mainly I just need it for documents, spreadsheets, email and surfing.
Thanks for any input.
I have been using Puppy (Tahrpup) for a couple years on an very old IBM Thinkpad and really like Puppy, and it runs great on this jalopy. But I imagine that the Acer can handle a more robust distro. I did one of those online distro chooser surveys, and Debian came out as the best choice for me since I want stability and don't do any tinkering under the hood. Will the latest release of Debian run on this Acer given its configuration? I don't do any high-end operations like video editing or gaming. Mainly I just need it for documents, spreadsheets, email and surfing.
Thanks for any input.
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Posted by: Linux Canuck <linuxcanuck@yahoo.ca>
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