Good or bad for Debain?
I've been slowly moving away from my beloved Novell owned SuSE four the past three or for months to Debain. It seems that Ubuntu, being based on Debian has some momentum. I see comments on both sides. I was wondering what our group thought about it?
TheDanMan
20-04-2005 09:32:59
If Ubuntu can do what debian is doing better, is that bad?
wolfjb
20-04-2005 13:09:13
Well, it's not completely Debian. It is based on the Sarge installer, but I understand there are differences. And there are a lot of tweaks to get the thing finally setup. Although the tweaking is painless, it's just too bad the install didn't do it for you.
The Ubuntu default repository seems to be lacking some of the packages, but that can be overcome by adding a couple new lines to the sources.list. Some nice things about it, the packages are probably newer (in certain cases anyway: notably GNOME, Xorg, kernel 2.6.x) and the six-month-new-release-thing is quite cool too. Certainly better than Debian in that regard since Sarge has been waiting for release for what? two years?
Otherwise, they seem to be the same distro. Ubuntu seems to come nicely configured with software (not a lot, but enough) with very little confusion on the install. Debian gives you more control during the install so you can pick and choose what you want a bit more than what seems likely in Ubuntu.
On the overall though, if Ubuntu lives up to the same freeness that Debian does, has a simpler install and newer packages sooner - how can this be bad (echoing previously posted comment and sentiment) unless Ubuntu just refuses to give back to Debian some of the advancements it makes.
[note] these remarks are based on reading about Ubuntu for a while and looking at screenshots, not actual experience[/note] That being said, I'll probably install Ubuntu on a separate drive shortly.
On the propaganda side - Way to go Chad!! Getting Debian installed and moving away from those more expensive distros!! Debian Rules!!
Ahem.
What I've read is that Ubuntu might make a better desktop distro than server distro. YMMV as usual.