Debian
An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0:
“I think it’s time for an honest review, to spur the Debian developers into making the best possible distribution. I really want Debian to succeed. I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can’t do that right now and I think it’s important people understand why.
“Tasksel wasn’t too bad, though I’d expect more options. For example, instead of X11 have “X11”, “Typical Desktop (Gnome & KDE)” and “Esoteric Desktop (WindowMaker and Enlightenment)” and so on. I was mystified to see I could select Fortran and Tcl/Tk support, but not Perl, PHP, or Java - some of the most popular languages today. However nothing, not in all my 22 years on this Earth, could prepare me for the horrors of dselect. Sweet merciful divine!”
This is precicely what my initial reaction to the debian installer was when I first ventured away from slack and redhat. I would consider myself fairly adept at operating systems in general, but the installer for debian is a huge fucking pain in the ass, and there’s very little that can be said to justify why it is that bad.