On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 02:59:51AM +0200, Franco Lanza wrote:
> More than the already know switch from gnome to xcfe4 as the default
> desktop and the oblovious change to sysvinit instead of systemd, i would
> to propose some other default changes in the standard install:
>
> nano -> vim
> exim -> postfix
>
>
> what do you guys think about that?

I believe it's not time for changes in the defaults. The first thing I
do on fresh installs is to pull in vim and emacs, make one of them the
default editor and remove the bloody exim. But I understand that most
users are unconfortable with vim, and nano is a viable alternative. In
any case, the principle of minimum surprise should be a guiding rule
of thumb. IMHO, a superificial Debian jessie user should not notice
the difference between Devuan and Debian, until she has to manually
start/stop a daemon from the terminal.

Then, since you are asking, I personally would prefer to have an as
small as possible fingerprint on the "basic" install, which possibly
implies *not* having a lot of garbage, including a proper MTA,
installed by default (nullmailer would be more than enough for most of
the uses of a basic install).

I am convinced that users should know exactly what they need before
they find it already installed in their system. As a matter of fact,
99.9% of the users do not need an MTA more powerful than nullmailer,
and maybe almost 90% of typical users do not ever need to edit a
file. Those who need something else should already be able to apt-get
install whatever. If they are not, then they should do a little
reading first. Having vim or an MTA already installed does not
automagically give you the sufficient knowledge to use them, BTW.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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