Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 11:30:20AM -0500, Matt London wrote:
> Firstly - I'm new to the list, so "Hi" :)
> 
> I've used both, for desktop, laptop and server usage. The main reason I
> hear for Ubuntu over Debian is age of packages - Ubuntu tend to push
> through newer releases a lot more quickly than Debian. Theoretically
> this means that debian/stable should be a more stable distro, but a lot
> of the time on the desktop you end up running testing or unstable, just
> because you want a version of some piece of software that's a little
> more up to date.
> 
> So in theory at least, Ubuntu should give you a distro with less change
> of breakage than debian/unstable, whilst giving you more up-to-date
> packages than debian/stable. In practice, this usually tends to be the
> case, but every now and again, things break.

Actually it seems that on average you are MORE likely to get breakage on a
unbuntu upgrade than you are with running debian testing or even unstable.

> Also, the Ubuntu folk seem to be a little less zealous over non-GPL
> software.

Debian is not all about GPL.  They are rather interested in free software
though, and they believe in making sure they don't break the rules.
They do have a perfectly usable non-free section for all the other stuff.

> Personally, I don't prefer one over the other - it's all a matter of
> horses for courses.

For me it is about having a system that works.  That means I run debian
unstable, not ubuntu.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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