April 16, 2009 at 15:30Thoughts Aloud (About Debian)
Frankly, lately I’ve been more and more absorbed in thinking about at least somehow providing feasible support in promoting the Debian distribution. Unfortunately, my level of English is so lame that I can not fully correspond with "foreign" developers, and the Russian community has recently become too sluggish. Therefore, I would like to share some of my thoughts here for now, in the hope that they might be able to interest someone.
* It seems to me that it would be useful to create an installation disk with Debian, which contained almost the same set of packages as in Ubuntu. Of course, installing the necessary set of packages through Aptitude is not at all so difficult, however it’s stupid to deny that it would be more convenient for most users to have OpenOffice, Synaptic, update manager and Rhytmbox out of the box. It would be possible to develop this project, under the brand, say “Debian Easy”.
* Debian is not just a pretty unattractive, but also a terribly confusing site. Why, after openSUSE and Fedora, do not rebrand? At least bit by bit, starting from the download page.
* Here on Habré people create amazing t-shirt designs, while also laying out all the graphic sources in open access! I think it would be great to launch a similar project as part of the Debian attributes store. People could either buy paraphernalia to support developers, or just freely download the source code and complete the matter personally. Even in the second case, this will play a role in popularizing the distribution.
* Why not try to follow non-standard ways of marketing? Say, having agreed with some store, to hand over a disc to each buyer for a 1.5 liter bottle of beer for free!
* It seems to me that it would be useful to create an installation disk with Debian, which contained almost the same set of packages as in Ubuntu. Of course, installing the necessary set of packages through Aptitude is not at all so difficult, however it’s stupid to deny that it would be more convenient for most users to have OpenOffice, Synaptic, update manager and Rhytmbox out of the box. It would be possible to develop this project, under the brand, say “Debian Easy”.
* Debian is not just a pretty unattractive, but also a terribly confusing site. Why, after openSUSE and Fedora, do not rebrand? At least bit by bit, starting from the download page.
* Here on Habré people create amazing t-shirt designs, while also laying out all the graphic sources in open access! I think it would be great to launch a similar project as part of the Debian attributes store. People could either buy paraphernalia to support developers, or just freely download the source code and complete the matter personally. Even in the second case, this will play a role in popularizing the distribution.
* Why not try to follow non-standard ways of marketing? Say, having agreed with some store, to hand over a disc to each buyer for a 1.5 liter bottle of beer for free!