Debian is free software, but is also not user friendly. To use Debian I have to resort to Linux Mint Debian Edition which is not 100% Debian but makes user tasks simpler and more accessible. Why this cannot happen with Debian?

Debian is extremely user friendly.
It even has copious documentation explaining in detail everything you need to know about running it.

LMDE is not 100% Debian. If it was, it would be Debian. It is mostly Debian, with Mint extras added.

What is user-unfriendly? If you provide examples, people will be able to provide answers.

It all depends on the user.

I agree with the comments above. Debian takes longer to install and set up than some other distros, but there's lots of documentation to help with all that. Once installed and set up, Debian Stable might be the most user-friendly distro out there, because it seems like nothing ever breaks. Of course, as brianL said, maybe it all depends on the user.

Yeah, if you're not prepared to do a bit of reading and thinking, then you may have problems.

I clicked "find more posts by italovignoli" but couldn't find where you asked for help with your Debian questions/problems?

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Debian is more user friendly than reading around the internet leads you to believe, especially today. Most things are very easy to do in Debian. The thing is, you have to read a little bit and follow directions. Debian itself as well as countless articles by others have plenty of information on getting up and running using popular setups and software.

The big difference is that Debian does not provide a button in a menu to do it for you, such as Ubuntu does. But Debian's goals are different than Ubuntu's.

---------- Post added 02-05-13 at 02:01 PM ----------

Debian is more user friendly than reading around the internet leads you to believe, especially today. Most things are very easy to do in Debian. The thing is, you have to read a little bit and follow directions. Debian itself as well as countless articles by others have plenty of information on getting up and running using popular setups and software.

The big difference is that Debian does not provide a button in a menu to do it for you, such as Ubuntu does. But Debian's goals are different than Ubuntu's.

About the only thing that LMDE does differently than Debian is to supply all the non-free packages.

Debian has them in their repos or they are easily available in the multimedia repo.

Debian does not include them because they take the ideas of "free" and "open" seriously. Many users do too. This can be a problem if you don't.

This is why there are distros like LMDE. They supply those packages, some of which are referred to by Mageia (for example) as "tainted", by default.

They are easy to get and install yourself but if you don't want to do that then Debian is probably not for you.

User friendly is a subjective term. LMDE would not be considered user friendly by someone that wants a free and open Linux install on their box. Some people think Debian is too lax in keeping those packages out. The fact that they are easily available makes some folks refuse to use Debian.

Those people would never, ever, consider installing some distro, like LMDE, that had those dodgy packages installed on their boxes because they would think of them as not friendly.

Use what works for you and that agrees with your thoughts on free and open. The Linux world has a lot of choices. It is up to you.

It is also up to the people behind a distro to deside what they want to do with that distro. In the case of Debian there is the huge Debian community that supports and puts out the distro. They have decided what they, as users, want in an OS. Must think it is user friendly. Has been supported by that community for 20 years.

You have all replied to someone who has been a member for 5 years before s/he posted and their 1st post was to complain. Apart from that I agree with all your replies and have nothing further to add.

Debian feels right at home for me just like Slackware and OpenBSD. Debian is simple and elegant to use, I think it is user friendly. Debian has excellent user documentation.

In the eyes of many people, that is user unfriendly. There is a multitude of people who do not want to read documentation in order to fine tune their systems. For them, user friendly means not having to do anything other than point and click. They consider having to learn anything, including reading installation instructions, makes a system a geek system. There are people who claim Ubuntu is too difficult to use. That being the case, there will be many more complaining about Debian being too difficult.

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True. Well-said. I appreciate excellent documentation because when you encounter an issue it is very likely that there is a fix for it in Debian, Slackware, and the BSDs. I actually find so called user-friendly distros harder to use because I feel constricted, locked in. I am in the habit of reading the f****** manual. That works for me.

Wouldn't they also find computers very hard to use?

I think the debian (graphical) installer is perhaps the one with most questions and options as far as I know - It just keeps asking more and more questions. Perhaps, that's where the non-user-friendliness (if that's a word) myth starts.

That all depends on what they want to do with their box.

I used Ubuntu for years as it became more and more "user friendly". They seem to assume that "user frindly" means that you install it, never change a thing and use it primarily for giggles and gosip (porn and social sites).

Probably safer to use than MS for that but not much.

People have been weened on MS. This is where the theory of something being intuitive comes from. It is not that it is intuitive it is what you are familiar with.

Take any OS and a computer in your time machine and go back to some of the great thinkers of the past and just set it down there for them. See how intuitive they find it to be.

Intuitive is another catch phrase for user friendly. It is a load of crap.

If you do not want to learn something new you are simply not going too and concider what ever the subject or object to not be user friendly. And in the case of an OS you will probably be correct for yourself.

What I am trying to say is that this is all subjective and that there is nothing about it that is objective.

If the OP believes that Debian is not user friendly then Debian is not user friendly.

Is to me. Seems it must be to you and the rest of us.

Probably we are not user friendly either. Probably just a bunch of elitist gurus who do not want people to use Linux.

I am 61. My Dreaded Mother in Law is 77. My wife is in her 50s. We all use Linux with no trouble what so ever. We all used MS until recently. My join date here is 3 weeks before my first Linux install.

Why don't we use MS. Because we think, in our faulty manner, that Linux is more user friendly.

I bet you do too. Weirdo.