A few days ago in another blog, I wrote a note about siduction, asking "What will it seduce?" Here are a few additional comments I wrote in a follow up blog note:
I found that the biggest attraction for former sidux users was a return to some of what the team and the community had hoped for in their original goals.
Debian Sid is not usually an environment or a system for casual software users, it is an environment for experimenters. The siduction distribution, based on Debian Sid, follows in those footsteps.
As I indicated yesterday, those who are looking for a trivial system that they plug in, run, and rarely maintain, there may be better alternatives available to them - perhaps something based on one of the stable Debian distributions.
Debian Sid is primarily for people who either develop software and want a fairly current platform upon which to develop their own work, or a platform where they want to test and use fairly current software, and usually current hardware as well.
It is in this particular area that siduction adds some incremental value to what the Debian Sid project already provides: recently updated software. The siduction project adds more current Linux-based kernels, which are more likely to support current hardware.
What you don't get as much of with either Debian Sid or siduction are a vast collection of graphically based system packaging and administration tools. There is a good reason for this: one of the frequently changing components in a developing software ecosystem is, in fact, the graphical drivers and accompanying software. If you are using all graphical administration tools and the graphical environment itself fails during an update or replacement of the environment, you can potentially be left without any working graphical user interface, and that's what these projects try to avoid, by instead encouraging the use of command-based administration tools.
Today, for example, when I updated the siduction packages, I found that the graphical display server was modified. Using the command based administration tool, smxi, not directly provided by siduction, but familiar to many community members, I was able to easily install the appropriate X server software, then start up my graphical user environment without any problem.
I may have been able to do that even if I had a graphical administration environment, but I almost certainly would have had to resort to the use of commands anyway to reinstall and restart the graphical environment, and that is why the developers of siduction prefer the use of commands. The main forum administrators are still not too keen on the use of smxi; they think it promotes laziness and does not teach what's needed to administrate and configure the system properly.
I take a different approach: I can figure out how to configure what's needed, but only when it's truly needed. Most of the time, I want convenience, but I do want access to the lower level tools, too, to get the job done. I prefer to make those choices available, and personally, I go out and get the tools that I want and I use them, regardless of what others prefer or recommend. For me, the key is to have the choice, and at least, I have those choices in this environment.
I found that the biggest attraction for former sidux users was a return to some of what the team and the community had hoped for in their original goals.
Debian Sid is not usually an environment or a system for casual software users, it is an environment for experimenters. The siduction distribution, based on Debian Sid, follows in those footsteps.
As I indicated yesterday, those who are looking for a trivial system that they plug in, run, and rarely maintain, there may be better alternatives available to them - perhaps something based on one of the stable Debian distributions.
Debian Sid is primarily for people who either develop software and want a fairly current platform upon which to develop their own work, or a platform where they want to test and use fairly current software, and usually current hardware as well.
It is in this particular area that siduction adds some incremental value to what the Debian Sid project already provides: recently updated software. The siduction project adds more current Linux-based kernels, which are more likely to support current hardware.
What you don't get as much of with either Debian Sid or siduction are a vast collection of graphically based system packaging and administration tools. There is a good reason for this: one of the frequently changing components in a developing software ecosystem is, in fact, the graphical drivers and accompanying software. If you are using all graphical administration tools and the graphical environment itself fails during an update or replacement of the environment, you can potentially be left without any working graphical user interface, and that's what these projects try to avoid, by instead encouraging the use of command-based administration tools.
Today, for example, when I updated the siduction packages, I found that the graphical display server was modified. Using the command based administration tool, smxi, not directly provided by siduction, but familiar to many community members, I was able to easily install the appropriate X server software, then start up my graphical user environment without any problem.
I may have been able to do that even if I had a graphical administration environment, but I almost certainly would have had to resort to the use of commands anyway to reinstall and restart the graphical environment, and that is why the developers of siduction prefer the use of commands. The main forum administrators are still not too keen on the use of smxi; they think it promotes laziness and does not teach what's needed to administrate and configure the system properly.
I take a different approach: I can figure out how to configure what's needed, but only when it's truly needed. Most of the time, I want convenience, but I do want access to the lower level tools, too, to get the job done. I prefer to make those choices available, and personally, I go out and get the tools that I want and I use them, regardless of what others prefer or recommend. For me, the key is to have the choice, and at least, I have those choices in this environment.
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