Ubuntu first time

[Alejandro Imass]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 02:41:13PM -0500, Alejandro Imass wrote:
>> It all depends on your needs. Ubuntu is just fine for everyday
>> workstations where you don't want to worry about things just working,
>> no matter how bad the approach may be (much a la Windoze) but it get's
>> the job done and it's not Windows.
>
> That's just it.  Ubuntu doesn't just work.  It's too buggy for that.
> And good luck if you actually try to upgrade to the next version.
>

No man, you can't assert that just like that. We use Ubuntu on a daily
basis and for much more than just simple stuff. I did find 11 to be
somewhat broken and I waited until 11.10 to upgrade from 10.10. Same
thing we've done since we started using it circa Ubuntu 5.04

We've used Debian stable extensively as well, a bit befor Woody,
though for the past few years we've migrated all our Internet servers
to FBSD. We are currently using Debian mostly for embedded solutions
and for deployment of VMs.

We also used Gentoo and Slack in past but not anymore.

> Now if you were using Mint, OK then I will give you the claim of
> 'just works'.  But not with Ubuntu.
>

Again I have to disagree. It may not work for you, but it works for
us, so I must vouch in favor of. I'm not saying is the best distro by
any means, but our particular needs to get laptops working quickly and
get stuff installed easily it works. For example, try and get Android
devel env on Debian stable, close to impossible or very quirky. Simple
stuff like OpenProject or a decent version of any package. Again,
Debian testing is different, but still some apps tend to be very old
as well. Debian unstable is just unsuable, so for apt-based distro
you're probably left with Ubuntu as a better choice. Not for every
application, but great for getting the job done.

Most Linux software works well and officially supported with Ubuntu
(e.g. Skype) so it's become some sort of standard. For example, we run
a team of developers that work both in Mac OSX and Ubuntu and deploy
on FBSD. i don't want my programmers to spend hours getting somewhat
later versions of open source packages that are very updated both in
MacPorts and FreeBSD, so Debian in that sense started getting in the
way.

>> For specialized workstations and servers Debian is clearly a better
>> choice. But then so is Slack and Gentoo. So it all depends... there is
>> no one size fits all and that is the beauty of Open Source in
>> particular Linux where there are many specialized distros for each
>> need.
>
> Actually I very much do think Debian does fit just about all tasks,
> including workstations.
>

Yes and no. Maybe if you use testing, but stable is simply too
retrograde to be very useful as a workstation. As a server, it's
usually great and very stable and secure, yet it has had it's share of
problems there. One thing that drove me a bit away of Debian is that
their concept of patching stuff to Debianize it seem a bit extreme and
over zealous. Rememebr the OpenSSH fiasco for example.

In conclusion, none of Linux distros are perfect, but you can't say
Ubuntu is a bad distro. IMHO it has probably done more than any other
distro to get Linux on the map. It's not meant as an inflammatory
comment and get into a distro war, but I think we must be fair and
objective with our comments here.

Cheers!

-- 
Alejandro Imass
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists