Debian Working To Modernize Its Website, Rolls Out New Homepage

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Working To Modernize Its Website, Rolls Out New Homepage

The Debian project's current website has arguably a rather dated look and feel but work is underway on modernizing the website to give it a fresh look. This week the project rolled out a redesigned homepage...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-2020-Modernize-Website

[Sonadow]

This is the peak of stupidity. Debian is an operating system distribution and not a community, no matter how people want to spin it. Why the hell should the front page be split between the distribution and the team?

I don't care about the people behind the Debian distribution and their stories as long as they are not discriminated against and deliver Debian releases as they are expected to.

[direx]

The most important thing that needs modernization is the Debian issue tracker. Right now it actually hinders people from reporting bugs or even from getting an overview of the state of a bug. Why not just use a GitLab instance or something like that?

[reba]

While I love the destribution their website makes me cringe everytime. It' so confusing and disorganized with an amateurish look that's unfit for a disti of this size and importance...

[ElectricPrism]

Historically Debian has always lagged behind and had one of the ugliest Linux distro websites. Just clicking around at a glance I see 3 different themes on different subdomains and it looks godawful at 4k in my tiling window manager aligned to the left and stretching 100%.

And there you have one reason why Debian never had the market share Ubuntu did -- it's first impressions have always been butt fucking ugly.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/debian.org

TL;DR -- Presentation/Looks matter.

[pmorph]

This is the peak of stupidity. Debian is an operating system distribution and not a community, no matter how people want to spin it. Why the hell should the front page be split between the distribution and the team?

I don't care about the people behind the Debian distribution and their stories as long as they are not discriminated against and deliver Debian releases as they are expected to.

Isn't that the point? Because of the split you can easily access the stuff you need without getting lost in the people stuff?

[EvilHowl]

Well, if I were them, I would spend more time improving the wiki rather than improving the main page. But that's just my opinion, I guess...

[Vorpal]

I'm actually feeling some nostalgia for the old design and am in a way sad to see it go. It was refreshingly simple and old school. Free of the cruft of the modern web (though the new page is not too bad with respect to this either).

That said, the usability was less than stellar (especially on mobile). On the whole, it probably needed a replacement. And as direx said above, the bug tracker is catastrophic.

[George99]

The debian website is still a mess. For instance most people need firmware files in order to get their pc fully operational. But it's almost impossible to find the proper download page from the start page. e.g. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/u...ding-firmware/

[skeevy420]

Historically Debian has always lagged behind and had one of the ugliest Linux distro websites. Just clicking around at a glance I see 3 different themes on different subdomains and it looks godawful at 4k in my tiling window manager aligned to the left and stretching 100%.

And there you have one reason why Debian never had the market share Ubuntu did -- it's first impressions have always been butt fucking ugly.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/debian.org

TL;DR -- Presentation/Looks matter.

My first impression was that I was on one of those horrid endless scrolling websites...and the scrolling abruptly ended with a GTK3 program with too much white space...And that home page is why following the GNOME HIG to the letter is stupid.

I'm also on 4K. If you zoom the page to 40% it looks like two web pages side by side. It's like the web site committee couldn't figure out who to make the home page for so they put two home pages on the home page. Yo dawg....where's Xzibit when you need him?