I've been to many forums and read many articles all claiming that Debian is complex or for "Elitist" but i've never run into any real problems while using Debian, so what is this? A joke that i have yet to get?

I think older versions of Debian were notoriously difficult to install (usually I failed at configuring X, whilst the same tool worked fine on Redhat or Mandrake). These days installing Debian is just like installing any other distro because the installer has been greatly improved.

It's fairly straight-forward, but wasn't always so, an in comparison to something SuSE, Mandriva or Fedora, is complicated. I wouldn't say it's elitist anymore than something like Gentoo or Slackware where it's all hands on decks, needing a good understanding of the basics. You probably could get by in Debian without much Linux knowledge assuming everything went fine during install, and are prepared to read the docs and take in things that are new. Quite a few people new to Linux don't have this attitude.

Man you hit it right on the spot! About everything I was gonna say right there....

I can understand that, I remember when I first installed Linux and I popped in a CD and it didn't load right away I was like....what's going on? lol. But I was already a command line junkie so after some reading I figured out everything I had to do and me and Linux (Debian) have been buds ever since. I think Windows just bored me with point and click, i'm one of those guys that likes to do everything, the type of guy who turns down management positions in favor of actually doing '"grunt"' work.

Hm, well I saw on the Debian.org site that you can download past versions and I was already planning on doing that just to see what they were like early on but now with the added ''no-no" of complication you say they have I think i will download them all the quicker

What kind releases you looking at going back to? Either brave or foolish...

Let us know how it goes + have fun

It isn't the distribution that gives it the reputation for being elitist. It is the people (mostly old-timers) that give it that reputation.

Back in the day, it was a bit rough to get installed because you really had to know a lot about what you already had, what you wanted, etc. If you knew these things, then debian was the distribution for you because configuration, etc. was so beautiful. That describes the "hard" portion.

For the elitism part, it was caused by these people that did run debian during those days getting very frustrated with others who did not know quite what they were doing, were not experienced in the intricacies of linux, and did not know what kind of hardware they had in a machine. They would then start asking all kinds of questions concerning any number of these different angles, and quite frankly would start to get annoying. The common answer would typically be "RTFM" or "STFW", which tends to give off an air of elitism. That and the questions would very often be phrased very poorly, often because the asking body wasn't quite sure what question to ask in the first place.

Well - for myself it is confusing due to the different versions. You have stable, testing, and unstable. Then the code names for them don't make it very clear either.

I guess I still don't understand what version of Debian I am using. I just downloaded a small 250MB disk and loaded a bare version of Debian and edited my sources.list with what I wanted.

I have still not been able to know how to verify what version of Debian you know you're using. With Fedora or Redhat, you know what you're using because that's what you downloaded and installed.

I think I'm not a newbie with Linux. Yet I agree that Debian is a harder to master than Mandriva for example.

I'm not talking about the installation. I'm talking about the system's management.

The main difference I see between Debian and other major distributions is the lack of a unique control panel. That is a problem because you have to know how to do things in Debian before doing them, from day one! You don't have time to adjust to it.

Example: you want to load a kernel module at boot. If you don't know Debian, you'll update the /etc/modprobe.* files, instead of using the update_modules system.

Other example: you want to configure something about your network interfaces at boot.
How do you do that if you don't know about /etc/interfaces?

Sure, you can put a bunch of commands in some rc file that gets executed on boot. You could even add lines to /etc/inittab in some cases.
But most of the time, distributions have devised better solutions than changing those last-resort files.

That's the difficulty with Debian in my opinion.

Yves.

Debian was the first linux distro I used. It was Woody, quite hard to install for a complete Linux newbie
So I reinstalled the whole system 3 times before it booted without any error, I was 14 at that moment so English was really hard for me to understand, what made everything extra complex :P So I looked, didn't liked it (it was even outdated at that moment) and removed it from my system. That was my first contact with Linux.
But about one year later I read that Debian had an automated installer at Sarge... I had to try this one out! It installed on my system without any problems so I was satisfied with Linux

So I really thinks it's all about the installer, the other things of debian are so easy: installing a kernel, I read it was very tough job on linux though with Debian it's so easy Installing other software is also very very easy (I use dselect, or apt-get) So I don't see it as a hard distro any more

i think it might have something partly to do with the "old-timer" user-base someone mentioned, most of whom are incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, but a few RTFM types who are annoyed with n00b questions.

but debian also seems to have a lot of debian-centric commands and ways of doing things that seem kind of weird coming from most other distros. a lot of them just are not intuitive in the least, like (offhand) some of the dpkg commands, or just try to exclude something from being upgraded with apt. the init system is different, and even compiling a kernel is different than the "basic" way, so i have to say that coming from more slack-based distros it does seem harder. otoh, if you started with debian, that probably feels more "normal," so i guess a lot of it is also relative.

I think Debian is fairly straight forward on the install. I was able to do it on my first try.

I never found debian hard but I started with debian,I just knew nothing of linux.I started when woody went stable.Is it easier today....yes.Back then there were just bugs and little quirks that have since been worked out.I dont know why people think debian is a eliteists' distro,kind of lame if you ask me.
Drivers back then werent plentiful or even as friendly as they are now....all in all,for all I knew it was the easiest since I was raw then.

For all those saying that Debian is easy, did any of you try Debian Potato and older releases?

My first install attempt was with Potato and it was quite a challenge, luckily I knew just enough about what modules and such from running Slackware off and on for about a year and a half. This made a lot of difference for me.
After getting past the installation, the point already made was the wall I was hitting me head against. The dpkg tools, what they where and what they where used for.
After a while I decided to try Ubuntu out... Suprise! It wasn't the cure all to end all!
There is a lot of documentation on how to get a cookie-cutter set of goals reached. Codecs, samba shares, how to install this and that, but it was all just as automated as everything else in the system. When a problem arose, there wasn't much to go on.
So now here I am waiting for the Sarge net-install to download again just to double check if I prefer FreeBSD to Linux. Nothing personal, just feel like playing around again.

Later that day:
Yup, Debain still beats the pants off of any other distro I've used. Well not counting Slackware, but I dont have the free time for that much customization these days.