Just for kicks, I used the Debian Sarge installer CD from my Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible on my kick-around machine. I just put together a very simple no internet startup machine, to see what it looked like.
Actually, what it looked like was Breezy. And that makes sense, I suppose. Sarge is dated really.
But it also kind of pushed me away from Debian. I felt like I was taking a step backward a year, and I didn’t care to tinker with things all over again, just to get the results I wanted.
So I played with Gnome for a bit, looked at the KDE side of the fence, then killdisked it again. I probably should have given it a chance — maybe set up the network or found the right video resolution — but it didn’t appeal to me.
And that’s okay, I guess. It just made things seem very far away.
That’s the same reason I moved away from Sarge. After many other distros including Ubuntu, I found my way back to Sarge’s successor ‘Etch’ (almost Stable) and it seems Debian has caught up with other distros in terms of desktop finess, plug’n’play etc. A pleasant surprise for me – Etch definitely worth a look if you’ve got a soft spot for Debian and bad memories of having to customize every bit of it.
Yea, I also recommend Etch (netinst). It’s not much different than Ubuntu though. But it’s easier to start with a minimal system.