Paul, Here are some answers from a Debian user.
- What are you using Debian for? My family computer runs Debian. I started with Woody, upgraded (well, reinstalled, actually), and then upgraded (really) to etch. Our system has two "seats". The main seat has three virtual terminals. All the terminals are running Gnome. So each family member only has to hit <Ctrl><Alt>F8 (or whatever) to be instantly in his/her desktop. Much better than the Gnome "switch user" feature. If the main seat is already occupied, he or she can sign on at the second seat. This works really well (on a 1.8 GHz, 768 MB Pentium, yet), with performance issues occurring only when streaming video and sometimes audio. - Why are you using Debian rather than RHEL/Fedora/CentOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, MacOS or Windows (or the other way around)? 1. I am curious to see what I gain and what I lose by limiting myself strictly to FOSS software. This is a kind of sociological question, which translates more generally into the philosophical question, can advanced human civilization exist in the absence of enterprises driven by self-interest and the profit motive? 2. I believe that a computer system cannot be secure if the source code is not available for inspection. - What about Debian do you think needs changing - do you have any specific gripes? In hours per day, the biggest function of our Debian system is to access the Internet. The absence of a FOSS implementation of Flash is a huge gap. I have installed the closed source Flash 9 player and Firefox plugin on some of the family user IDs. Without it I would face a revolt. I don't use it (see the previous question) which is a handicap. So, we need Flash - frequently updated! It seems to me that more people would use a multiseat configuration if it were easy to set up. My own family situation can't be unique! In Sarge, I had to do some patching and recompiling to support the "two seat" configuration. In Etch, it can be done with configuration files only. But it's not easy, and there are some serious rough edges. e.g. the nv driver (open source nvidia) does not do the two seat thing properly, and the character mode virtual terminals (F1, F2, ... ) don't work. More precisely, the keyboard works, but the screen remains blank. Also, Gnome pops up Nautilus windows on ALL the active virtual terminals when a device (CD-ROM, USB) is mounted. Then they stay active when it is dismounted. I could probably think of a few more. Sound could be better. I think ALSA can be configured to mix inputs from multiple sources simultaneously, but I have not figured out how to do it. So (especially with my two seat configuration) sound sometimes does not work for one program because another program is using the sound driver. How about having Debian install a default configuration that would work out the wrinkles in this? Hope this is of interest. -- ================================================= This email is digitally signed using the Enigmail and GnuPG packages (http://enigmail.mozdev.org), which can also be used by the recipient to verify the digital signature. =================================================
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