Ubuntu first time

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:54 AM, Alejandro Imass <aimass-EzYyMjUkBrFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> You mean like 'Debian Unstable is unusable'?
>>
>
> Oh my god! I have a typo, please spare my life!
>
> If you are a Debian user you know for a fact that Debian unstable is
> so quirky it makes it unusable, un-usable, not-usable, or whatever you
> wanna call it, like it's very name: unstable and hardly good for any
> practical use.

What?

Debian unstable hasn't been visibly unstable in *years*.

I recall the days of the "Perl problem," when some bleeding edged Perl
bits got pushed out more quickly than they ought to have been, but I
think that was well back into the 1990s.  (e.g. - MORE THAN 10 YEARS
AGO.)

I have found the converse to be true, that Debian unstable is hardly
ever quirky.

> "Testing" is quite good and probably the best choice for doing
> anything on the desktop that requires some relatively new version of
> anything. Stable is great for servers yet the packaging is so old it
> can be challenging sometimes to get things done and you may wind up
> compiling many things from source.


One might wind up compiling from source, but that's quite likely to be
a mistake in comparison with dropping an extra entry or two into
/etc/apt/sources.list along with some preferences in
/etc/apt/preferences.d/simple so that you generally favor Stable over
Testing over Unstable over Experimental.

If you are compiling many things from source, then you're fighting
against the packaging system rather ferociously, and that is rather
suggestive of using the system badly.

It is equivalent to...

- Writing FORTH programs that have more code grinding thru stack
manipulations than doing Real Work

- Writing Lisp programs that spend most of their code on list
manipulations rather than doing Real Work.

- Writing Scheme programs where most of the code is spent building
tail recursions and/or continuations rather than...

If you have to "defeat" the packaging system rather than using it,
then chances are that you're in a losing battle.

> Debian is a great OS, but so is Ubuntu and it's unfair to create this
> FUD just because YOU think Debian is awesome and Ubuntu is crap,
> because it's not. They satisfy different needs and to solve real-world
> problems, and so do the other Linux distros, and non Linux OSes as
> well.

Well, Ubuntu deserves a certain bit of "bashing;" it has taken some
different choices as to the preferences used to construct it, and
those preferences are not undeserving of criticism.

They have made some rather controversial choices that initiate a
pretty substantial risk that they're leaping off cliffs into
destruction.  To some, the potentially-suicidal choices may seem a
fine thing.  "When the dust clears, we'll still be running Debian..."
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
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