Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Matt London <lists-aILacZ9cc/a1Qrn1Bg8BZw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Thomas Milne wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Madison Kelly <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 01:06:50AM -0500, Rajinder Yadav wrote:
>>>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/karmic_koala_frustration/
>>>> Yet more evidence against fixed release dates.
>>> Oddly enough, I still think it's a beautiful release and heads above 9.04. I
>>> guess the lesson here is; For best results, backup and re-install. :)
>>>
>>
>> This is going to sound like a troll, but I am honestly trying to
>> understand. I've tried Ubuntu, and it was nice. But in the end I
>> looked at Debian and thought 'it's as good or better, and I'll never
>> have to reinstall again, or at least until I get new hardware'. At
>> that point it was an easy choice.
>>
>> Surely the Ubuntu install is no easier than Debian, especially for
>> experienced users like yourself. I don't remember anything from Ubuntu
>> that I can't get on Debian.
>>
>> So, what is the advantage to using Ubuntu?
>>
>
> 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.
>
> Also, the Ubuntu folk seem to be a little less zealous over non-GPL
> software.
>
> Personally, I don't prefer one over the other - it's all a matter of
> horses for courses.

My suspicion is that what you *actually* get with Ubuntu is something
a lot more like "debian/unstable" than like "debian/stable," so that
if you think debian/unstable breaks too much (which I tend *not* to
find to be the case, at least not during this millennium), then it's
pretty likely that Ubuntu will be fragile in similar ways.

I don't get the feeling that Ubuntu does 3 years worth of QA work for
each release, so it seems unlikely that Ubuntu would be nearly as
stable as debian/stable...
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