The rapid rise of Ubuntu Linux tells an interesting story. You may find this article helpful in understanding this Linux phenomenon.The founder once paid $20 million and trained for a year to go into space. He was a debian developer in the early 1990’s, started Thawte in 1995 and sold it four years later for one half a billion.
After launching Ubuntu, the company shipped its 1 millionth CD within six months. Many people ask if this is another Linspire and the answer is definitely no. This is a mature Linux desktop, it’s free, they’ll ship you as many CD’s as you want for free and there’s no catch.
Review implies critiquing not just selling
.
Anyway, Ubuntu was nice; until I couldn’t get two packages to install from the default repo’s anymore (I don’t know why, it was just me and just those two packages). Back to Slack for me!
How do you make Ubuntu? Install Debian and replace Debian logo with Ubuntu logo.
“Many people ask if this is another Linspire and the answer is definitely no. This is a mature Linux desktop, it’s free, they’ll ship you as many CD’s as you want for free and there’s no catch.”
What’s wrong with Linspire, is it not a mature Linux desktop?
I think he’s making the point that Ubuntu is just as polished as Linspire, but Ubuntu is available for free (while, to my knowledge, Linspire is not).
Nonsense, Ubuntu is way more polished, at least on the desktop. For example, if you get Ubuntu installed, you can be sure to have a very smooth and polished Gnome environment. If Ubuntu had a somewhat more newbie friendly installer (à la three or four clicks to install and easy partitioning), it would be the only distro I would recommend to a green GNU/Linux user.
Debian, on the contrary, is very unreliable in this aspect. Debian sid, the only viable desktop solution for (pure) debian, is way less polished and reliable than the average Ubuntu system. The two big DE’s need quite some care, if you want to have them as polished as their Ubuntu counterparts. Some icons are missing, i18n is sometimes a pain (only partly translated). Ugh.
Don’t get me wrong, before I discovered the simplicity of Arch, I was a huge fan of Debian, but it is imo ridiculous to claim that Ubuntu is ‘just Debian’ with another logo. That really doesn’t do justice to the (K)Ubuntu devs.
I could’nt use it. It would let me SU to root for some things but for other things it would say my password was invalid. Very strange.
So I had to ditch it.
<!– I think he’s making the point that Ubuntu is just as polished as Linspire, but Ubuntu is available for free (while, to my knowledge, Linspire is not). –>
That seems pretty obvious. He wrote a positive review at LinuxJournal on Linspire — said it was good for Linux but was not ready for the enterise. Something like that.
The rocket success of Ubuntu is mostly due to its developers doing the necessary changes long overdue in Debian. Modern kernel, no obsolete archs, integrated desktop, reasonable default settings, user oriented design, no politics, no ideology, less flame. Very refreshing experience for frustrated Debian users in late 2004.
The bare existence of Ubuntu as an alternative has a very positive
effect on Debian itself. This organization was in desperate need of a competitor. I hope the internal wars will cease now and DD will focus on the competition for users again. In an ideal case Ubuntu will become a testbed for advanced design changes and Debian will follow from a safe distance. Thank’s Steve.
One of the most convincing out there. Clear development map, polished desktop, PACKAGE UPDATES BETWEEN RELEASES, simple and free, friendly, active and well organised community. It looks like a platform to me.
Only reason I am not using it right now is that there is a bug in kernels from 2.6.8 (in my experience) that’s just fixed 2.6.12 in my ali15x3 ide chipset that’s keeping me from running it.
My debian looks cool now with the latest of kde and gnome but I was at that stage pretty much instantly with ubuntu whereas it took get there with a mix of unstable, experimental and so on. Debian is mo
“How do you make Ubuntu? Install Debian and replace Debian logo with Ubuntu logo.”
You’re wrong Judas. After using both Ubuntu and Debian I’ve come to realize how different Ubuntu has already got from Debian in a relatively short time. A few screenshots or short reviews don’t tell the whole story. Ubuntu devs have done quite a lot to change the internals. That’s also why they advice not to mix Debian and Ubuntu package sources (something that also I noticed should be taken seriously). Some other similar Debian-based distros like Mepis or Libranet are much more Debian compatible than Ubuntu is.
My major problem with Ubuntu is exactly this (ever growing?) non-compatibility with Debian. I, for example, tried to install some debs/software from non-Ubuntu sources, and quite soon I got into many dependency problems.
I had a few other problems too. For example, I used the expert install, and immediately after the install, some things were broken in my Ubuntu. Some repository sources felt a bit unreliable at times too.
Overall, I have rather mixed feelings about Ubuntu. On the other hand it is definitely one of my top fav distros of all time, and I don’t hesitate to recommend it to my friends who would like to use/try Linux. But I also feel that some of Debian’s stability is lost and that Ubuntu is a bit more fragile than Debian. Also, as a long time Debian user it is simply hard to accept how different the system has got from classic Debian in some of its internals…
Debian has a huge active dedicated and professional developer community and it is known to produce good quality tested software. Why wouldn’t Ubuntu try to remain more Debian compatible and cooperate with Debian more? I feel that it would be useful to both Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu could use Debian software and high quality software sources, and Debian, with its slower development and release policy, could try to implement some of the new Ubuntu things into classic Debian later too.
Instead of offering the simple option of running all using ALSA, it still sets up OSS, with ESD and all that rubbish. It’d been a long time I since I had last had to fix the sound on a distro.
“Why wouldn’t Ubuntu try to remain more Debian compatible and cooperate with Debian more? I feel that it would be useful to both Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu could use Debian software and high quality software sources, and Debian, with its slower development and release policy, could try to implement some of the new Ubuntu things into classic Debian later too.”
Exactly. This is still a mistery to me. As it is still a mistery why Ubuntu is so much better than many other distros: Debian Proper, SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora, Kanotix (great, undervalued distro) (note that they are all freely downloadable, in one form or another)
I was a big Debian fan for a long time and when I tried Ubuntu, I was less than impressed, I’m not sure what it was, but it just seemed … I’m not sure….. something about the feel of it.. it just wasn’t right. I used Debian woody, sarge, and Sid prior to that, liked them all, in addition to that, I used Simplymepis which was in instant sell. Anyway, maybe I am just used to my gentoo systems, but I did not like the general feel of Ubuntu.
Long live Gentoo lol
had to say it cause I knew someone would lol
I dont know why people prefer this “new kid round the block”. Tell me 2 good reasons why I should switch to UBUNTU. If it is getting popular because of the free CD’s , well I have broadband connection.
Nothing’s wrong with Fedora. It’s a great distribution once you tweak it and add packages, etc. I use Fedora and Ubuntu and like them both very much.
But, I hang with the Ubuntu people because of the community aspect. I like a large active community. Fedora is moving in the direction of creating a community now. But, Ubuntu just seems like the old days when Red Hat had a community and we worked together.
The free CD’s have nothing to do wit their success BTW. It takes a long time to get them and almost every user has downloaded their iso’s and burnt their own CDs.
I could’nt use it. It would let me SU to root for some things but for other things it would say my password was invalid. Very strange.
So I had to ditch it.
LOL! You have got to be kidding me? This has been rehashed over and over at every single Ubuntu article (as well as numerous others) on OSNews, Slashdot, etc. Ubuntu uses sudo by default.
sudo passwd root
problem solved. 😛
I dont know why people prefer this “new kid round the block”. Tell me 2 good reasons why I should switch to UBUNTU. If it is getting popular because of the free CD’s , well I have broadband connection.
I don’t think anyone cares whether you switch from Fedora personally. But to entertain you, 18 months of security updates, new Gnome within a month of it being released, I find it runs faster than Fedora (altho i havent tried FC4).
Or you could do the standard Linux thing, and use whatever works for you.
(sorry if I appeared rude, but these people constantly asking what distribution they should use or why they should switch is kind of annoying. If everyone knew why YOU should switch and everyone agreed on what distribution everyone else should use, then there would only be one distribution.)
Actually, I think it is a stratgic mistake to set the sounds to play for EVERY FREAKING event in KDE by default. That annoys the crap out of me. At least the sounds in Gnome are unobtrusive.
Every distro has shortcomings, bugs, and/or quirks. I have yet to find a perfect Linux distro. For the most part, finding solutions to problems can be very difficult and time consuming. Many users become frustrated when they can’t find fixes or answers.
This is where Ubuntu shines. Like other distros, it has its share of problems. However, the Ubuntu community is head and shoulders above the rest. If you have a problem, you can first check ubuntuguide.org. Chances are you will find step by step instructions to fix your problem. If not, the Ubuntu forums are very active and well organized. I have used Mandriva, SuSE, Fedora, Xandros, Mepis, Lycoris, Linspire, Debian, Libranet, and Yoper. All are great distros, but none have a community on par with Ubuntu.
When you couple this with the frequent release cycle, up-to-date packages, zero cost for this distro, the ease of software installation via apt/synaptic, and the polish of the distro itself in regard to desktop use, Ubuntu is very hard to beat.
One thing i love about Ubuntu is that it incorporates fairly recent versions of everything.
On a semi-related note, who do you think will be the first distro to feature a compositing manager and provide an Aqua-esque desktop? Nat Friedman said Novel/Suse would be ready to go shortly, but i wonder if Ubuntu will beat them to it.
“I dont know why people prefer this “new kid round the block”. Tell me 2 good reasons why I should switch to UBUNTU.”
Exactly! Even if Fedora is not my favorite, I still like it more than Ubuntu.
I tried the latest test version of Fedora 4 and I quite liked what I saw. It seems that it is getting better (IMO). Now I am downloading the final.
I wish that J.A.M.D. linux was still around. Then a Fedora derivative could easily be my favorite or second favorite linux distro.
For me using Ubuntu is all about the community’s well managed and newbie friendly forums at http://www.ubuntuforums.org, as well as, the knowledgeable and extremely friendly people who frequent Ubuntu’s IRC channel on freenode.net.
As side note, I use to be a KDE die-hard, however, the Ubuntu developers have done a very good job of producing the first cohesive and polished Gnome desktop environment I have had the pleasure to use. I now use Ubuntu’s Gnome Desktop, as my sole GUI computing environment, and look very much forward to the future of Gnome’s development and success.
Ubunty community head and shoulders above the rest?….. I don’t know about that, There are other communities that I know are as good or better… although I will not point the one in particular out because i am not trying to start a war
ahhh, what the heck, I’ll point it out lol
Gentoo community blows all the rest away, yes, including Ubuntu
not here bragging just… know what you are talking about before you post
I got 11 free Ubuntu 5.04 CD packages by mail. :*) One would have been enough, but I guess I made a mistake in ordering or something. Anyway, the CD packages won’t be wasted, I’ve already converted a handful of frieds to Ubuntu users by donating them a Ubuntu CD package. It consists of a live-CD and an installation CD. The live-CD is OK but I had at first troubles with the installer.
I installed Ubuntu using the “server” option and didn’t like the result. The shell mode felt strangely sluggish, I’ve never experienced anything similar with Debian (or any other distro). I installed Midnight Commander from the universe repo but the ncurses interface was broken, it looked terrible. I did a second “server” installation but got the same results.
Then I decided to do the right thing and use the default (desktop) installation method. This time everything worked fine and I was very impressed by the result. The Gnome desktop felt really slick and polished. On the other hand, I haven’t used Gnome for two years, so I don’t know how much of my positive experience is actually Ubuntu’s credit. But Ubuntu’s installation clearly involves less configuring or interaction from the user than Debian. (The downside, of course, is that you get what Ubuntu developers think you need, while in Debian you configure more and get what YOU think you need. ;*))
My conlusion is that Ubuntu makes a slick and easy Gnome desktop (plus a decent live-CD) but it will not compete with Debian on the server arena in the near future. Anyway, after successfully installing Ubuntu I returned to Debian because Debian just feels better to me. But I might check out also the future releases of Ubuntu. This distro is a delicious addition to the long list of Debian derivatives and I will continue converting friends to Ubuntu users (as long as I’ve got free CD packages to give away).
“I have yet to find a perfect Linux distro.”
Well, I have been using Linux for quite a while now and tried hundreds of distros. I found two which (of course from my point of view) were almost nirvana: SUSE 9.0 (after that I began to like SUSE less and less) and now Kanotix.
Indeed, “perfect” (or almost perfect) is what works for you.
“Anyway, the CD packages won’t be wasted, I’ve already converted a handful of frieds to Ubuntu users by donating them a Ubuntu CD package.”
LOL, this happened at my local lug as well. This could partly explain why Ubuntu became so popular so suddenly.
Take Libranet as an opposite example: with their price it is a miracle that they are 17th at Distrowatch.
Imagine Apple using brown as the default color of their desktop. What, can’t imagine it? That’s because they would *never* do something so stupid. No matter how technically brilliant, if Ubuntu is not asthetically attractive people will not want to use it. It’s all about sensible defaults, and having a brown theme is not sensible. It reminds people of dirt, or fecal matter or something.
I find the brown desktop theme 10x more pleasing than OSX’s default desktop. Calling it stupid is just well….
Nowadays when I download another distro I can barely use them past a few minutes. I can’t stand even WinXP.
Trolltech vs Canonical. I prefer Canonical. 🙂
Before this article I didn’t know about the Mark Suttleworth’s past involvement with Debian. Things start making more sense with such knowledges.
It was a clean article — easy to read and swallow.
I wish my dedicated server had Ubuntu on it instead of Debian!
I not sure if a community being bigger equates to being better. For me its a sense of no question being too stupid to ask and people readily being able to offer help in a friendly and timely manner.
Not only is there an outstanding community vibrancy surrounding Ubuntu, but also a community that truly wants to help the non-technically inclined to share in the experience which is Linux and opensource.
breezy is up and running. installed java, realplayer, w32codecs from hoary extras. only problem i am having is getting my pictures off the camera.
anyway, by the time breezy comes out in the fall it should be better than ever.
i still need to figure out how to get the dlink wireless working on my laptop that has hoary installed.
everything else in hoary works. i only upgraded to breezy cause i got a problem with an itch.
ubuntu.
i find it amazing that anyone would switch from debian to ubuntu, i am not talking about people who tried debian or used it for a while but long time debian users that switch….
dont get me wrong, i tried it, it was alright, until i installed a lot of uncommon packages that I personally prefer over the mainstream ones, here comes dependency errors or just broke packages….
not as flexible and certainly not as modular as sweeeeet debian…
oh and the dingaling that said something about ubuntu saving debian or whatever….. you have no clue do you!!!!
X.org
Up to date GNOME
Up to date packages in general
Hotplug that actually works out of the box
Security updates for the up to date packages
Security updates for previous versions (eg, all the warty workstations I have at work.
Those are my reasons.
Ubuntu is nice, but it’s not as nice as it could have been. It’s not as good at hardware detection and setup as Knoppix, it doesn’t look as good as other distros, the installer is primitive compared to others like Mandriva. I had issues like:
-no recognition of SATA CD and hard drives, had to modify the BIOS to even install it
-had to update the kernel to 2.6.11 for SATA support, disable inotify (was locking up the machine on login)
-screen resolution was set to 640×480, couldn’t change it til I figured out the right tweaks for xorg.conf
-sound, didn’t work at all, had to do some stuff with alsa mixer (which wasn’t installed by default) and alsactl.
And the spatial finder sucks, especially how it resizes the window. I know they are trying to be more like the old Mac OS 7 finder, but I remember that one and there were 4 crucial things about it that Ubuntu lacks – one, it was fast as hell, second, the window didn’t magically resize and relocate on its own, third, you held down the option key (or something) if you wanted the parent folder to close (not close by default like in Ubuntu), and fourth, you could hold down the command key and click on the title bar to quickly go back to a parent folder. In Ubuntu, going back to parent folders is a pain in the butt.
I think you have had just bad luck, I have tried it on several desktops/laptops and I never had a problem.
For me it works great, i’m thinking of switching to debian but i’m not sure yet, have to play around a bit to see.
You can’t su to root in ubuntu, if you type
#su –
you will get a passwd error, you should use the root terminal or there is a command that can make the su account persistant in a terminal but I can’t remember. sudo -R or something.
After switching from 2 years of slacking, I found out that apt-get is actually simpler than slackwares so-called simple package management (or rather the lack thereof)
Slackware has such limited amount of packages available that it was routine to just download sources, complile – whoops depedancy problem, download another lib, whoops dependancy problem, and spend an hour traversing down the dependancy tree.. (ala RPM like back in the day -Redhat 6.2 -dunno what it’s like now)
anyways the moral of the story is, don’t beleive the hype and more importantly -don’t believe the fud! –Oh yes and Ubuntu rocks!!! (so much that I am willing to omit my pet peeve, multiple exclamations!!!!)
It seems to be a general opinion that Ubuntu is “a more up-to-date Debian than Debian” and this article repeats the same opinion. But, as a Debian user, I’ve always had the impression that Debian (testing) is generally more up-to-date than Ubuntu’s latest release. Sure, Ubuntu has X.org and the latest Gnome but so have most of the the other distros, except Debian of course. Debian’s unstable and testing branches have rejected the X server and Gnome upgrades because of the Sarge release but now the latest Gnome is already in Debian unstable and X.org should follow soon enough. And after some testing in unstable, both Gnome 2.10 and the latest X.org will appear in Debian testing, too. Now, with the stable Sarge release under its belt, Debian’s development in the unstable and testing branches will speed up considerably.
But what about the other packages, are they more up-to-date in Ubuntu than in Debian? I surveyed the package version tracker in Distrowatch and found some evidence that my impressions were correct and all this talk about Ubuntu’s up-to-dateness was just a myth.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu
Distrowatch keeps track of 52 essential packages (XFree86 and X.org have separate entries) that are found on most GNU/Linux distros. Distrowatch marks the version number of the available package in red when it is “development or beta version”, in green when the package is “the latest stable version”, and in black when the package version is older than the latest stable version. In practice this means that the more there are green entries, the better. Lots of red entries means that the distro is unstable and lots of black entries means that the distro is not very up-to-date. Here are the results of my little comparison:
Debian stable: 1 red, 17 green, 32 black /All: 50 packages
Debian testing: 2 red, 19 green, 29 black /All: 50 packages
Debian unstable: 2 red, 26 green, 22 black /All: 50 packages
Ubuntu 4.10: 1 red*, 3 green, 35 black /All: 39 packages
Ubuntu 5.04: 0 red, 9 green, 35 black /All: 44 packages
Ubuntu snapshot: 5 red, 30 green, 9 black /All: 44 packages
*The one red in Ubuntu 4.10 is a Distrowatch mistake, according to version numbers it should be black.
This comparison shows that Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty) and 5.04 (Hoary) ship with clearly more out of date software than any of the Debian versions. Also, Ubuntu has less available packages. The Ubuntu snapshot is more up-to-date than even Debian unstable but it also has more unstable development versions of packages. By the time Ubuntu 5.10 will be released, however, Debian unstable (and possibly also Debian testing) will most likely be once again more up-to-date than Ubuntu.
Yeah, I’m not going to read all that you just said, sorry, but I’m willing to say that Ubuntu is up-to-date without the breakage that’s possible with Debian, if you upgrade, dist-upgrade, install lots of packages, etc. Many distros with are based on Debian have these problems. On the other hand, thanks to the Ubuntu people who maintain their own repositories, I’ve not had the problems that I once had with other distros based on Debian.
Debian sid, the only viable desktop solution for (pure) debian
This is not the case – debian stable (sarge) makes a perfectly usable GNOME desktop solution (I cannot vouch for how useful the KDE is, I am yet to use it).
This is why ubuntu is so successful. It has no single unique attribute, but it has a unique combination of attributes:
1. It’s free. Some distros are freeish, but make life difficult if you don’t subscribe
2. It’s big. That means lots of packages, lots of documentation and an effective community
3. It’s focussed on desktop users
4. It’s has a big focus on usability. The standard ubuntu desktop is designed for working, not playing
5. It uses intelligent defaults
6. It provides a sensible mix of standard packages
7. It uses generic (ie not distribution specific) configuration tools. That means it’s easy to find advice from non-ubuntu sources
8. It releases regularly. That means it’s stable without ever being out of date
9. Criticism, arrogance, flames and put-downs just don’t exist in the community
Other distributions equal or better ubuntu in each of these areas. But I challenge anyone to find another distro that scores highly on all points. Of DistroWatch’s top 10, only Fedora comes close (I think – that’s one distro that I’ve not yet tried).
I’m not flaming other distros. They each have their own purpose, focus and strengths and each is perfect for some people. But ubuntu has found a huge market niche that was previously unfilled.
@Anonymous (IP: —.stru.polimi.it)
“And the spatial finder sucks, especially how it resizes the window. I know they are trying to be more like the old Mac OS 7 finder, but I remember that one and there were 4 crucial things about it that Ubuntu lacks – one, it was fast as hell, second, the window didn’t magically resize and relocate on its own, third, you held down the option key (or something) if you wanted the parent folder to close (not close by default like in Ubuntu), and fourth, you could hold down the command key and click on the title bar to quickly go back to a parent folder. In Ubuntu, going back to parent folders is a pain in the butt.”
1) it’s called “nautilus” and i’d say its goal would be to take the best of both macos finder “classic” + osx
2) spatial means (among other things) that windows *keep* their size/position. nautilus doesn’t automatically resize *anything*, that could be a nice feature though
3) it’s quite fast already, i read gtk2.8 will improve on this field
4) same thing in gnome, it’s the Shift Key
5) same thing in gnome, it’s even more idiot-proof: click on the bottom-left button in any nautilus spatial window
Going to parent folder takes exactly one click
notes:
1) i guess you didn’t even try it
2) that’s gnome, not ubuntu, you’re talking about
sorry but:
sarge has just been released. it ships gnome2.8
hoary has been on the wild since early april: gnome2.10
or were you talking about unstable branches?
debian unstable is starting to include gnome2.10 *now*
ubuntu unstable has been running gnome2.11 for a while already, will upgrade to gnome2.12 as soon as early betas become available.
take my stupid example with a grain of salt, you can compare gnome packages with everything you want… gcc4, latest kernels etc etc they’re very bleeding edge but *that’s*not*the*point*: i love debian *and* ubuntu.
things like “debian vs ubuntu” are plain stupid. just because one of the goals ubuntu has set is to contribute back to debian. just because many ubuntu devs are debian devs, just because many ubuntu users (like me) are also debian users.
peace and… ubuntu to you 😉
I tried the Ubuntu 5.04 live cd.
1)The bootup is very slow compared to knoppix or kanotix.
2)It always resets my clock to some other time zone which is very annoying every time i boot it up.
Other than that Ubunut usage feels good.
ye and fedora is more uptodate since it was relesed later…
However, Ubuntu don`t have support for HW that is supposed to be on the junk jard, and if you look at how many who use it compared to x86.. and better yet, what is normally holding packages from entering testing.. yes it`s not x86…
and another thing: why does debian work so well at some things ( comunity) vs having a clear time line and what eg sarge should have had in packages ( dhcp 2?? vs 3.2) for 4 years debian have been saying Sarge will soon be out, without even considering that the installer have to be done, then one move packages into testing that should be there.. and don`t say it has to do with bugs, dhcp package 2 vs 3 had nothing to do with that ( read mailing lists) a non-profit management that lacks management, wich is some of the core of non-profit ( mission staetment etc)
However all the flaming, I hope debian, now with an installer can sit down and make a “Fedora” timeline, what new should be included and maby cut some old hw ports that use 2.25 kernel
My Favorites about Ubuntu
*Clean Interface.
*Hardware compatibility
*wireless out of the box. (Netgear 54g Card)
**by default will look for access points.. (Awesome)
*Easy Software Installs
*Great Wiki & forums
(–<Aaron>–)
A brief FYI: we recently certified SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux on Ubuntu Linux. Free download available at: http://my.scitechsoft.com/navigate.php
what is that trash of discussion, which distri is better? if it would go in depth, it would be ok, but that is not the case.
(ok, i admit, there are some, but too few)
first of all, both are not commercial, there is no need of competing each other, but work more together.
second is, every distri has its weakness and strengths. best choice of distri is only upon your personal needs.
my current setup is, at home my main pc works gentoo and ubuntu on my notebook (that i use during the week when in university in another city).
i tried various distris and found for now ubuntu as the best choice (for my personal needs!). my reasons are:
– i wanted an easy to install distro with almost no configuring, but also not commercial
(suse is easier to install, configure and setup, but have to pay upgrades)
– i wanted a system, that i install and then just upgrade to new versions. i hope ubuntu accomplishes it, as it was my main reason to choose it. as ubuntu is derived from debian and debian upgrades works, hopefully ubuntu does the same.
(suse upgrades are catastrophic, sorry, had no luck with it. gentoo is perfect, but it takes too much time configuring and compiling. on my main station I kept it, because of so much invested time in getting it work. debian unstable works, but it has often broken packages. ubuntu has freezes, so you do not run in troubles.)
– fairly actual and stable packages
(debian stable/sarge are too old, with other branches there are broken packages, but admit they are very stable. ubuntu might be less stable, but has a good mix of actual but stable packages. i can work with it and have not fix again things because of updates. i know this, because my parents are running debian unstable, well, also have no time to switch it to ubuntu.)
– security updates
(debian unstable does not garantee of security updates. ubuntu does it. well, only the main repository, but it is enough for now. i hope the main repository will grow more, at least for critical packages as proftpd and other like this.)
– packagemanagement is apt
(I remember reinstalling gnome on a fedora distri with yum, this was catastrophic. debian and ubuntu have no problems with such a task.)
for my little server at home i use debian stable as actual packages do not really matter, server install is not bloated, can use it with 3.1 kernel 2.4, as my machine is a pentium 166 with 64megs, and packages are very stable and there are also security fixes. repositories are more than huge enough, as it only works as web- and fileserver.
next point is ide:
well, gnome and kde are good. kde better for configuring details and more things. gnome better as cleaner interface, better configured in ubuntu.
so i use gnome and start kde programs for some internal configurations (in kde setting up samba is easier. i only need one folder read only and one writable with a general quota. this is enough for desktop use. all the time you need more to configure, the less productive you are.)
another point: actual packages
ok, debian unstable has overall more actual packages, but less stable than ubuntu, they are more carefully chosen.
(i run wine successfully in ubuntu, for my parents i had to wait 3 weeks, until there was a wine update for installing ie6. yes, you need ie6, if you want to pay less for flight tickets eg. opodo.de are not firefox/mozilla/konqueror compatible. and i dont want to switch to windows for this dumb tickets.)
remember, this choice is best for my needs. your needs will differ surely, so other distris will be the solution.
for example, my parents only use email, surf, print catalogues (my mother is an artist). they just want to learn one interface and keep this. the system should just work.
so the new debian 3.1, suse keeping one year or fedora with their default packages are also possible good solutions. (yes, gentoo also, but i have not the time configuring/compiling for updates.)
ok, i hope this was not toooooo long and the text is understandable enough, because I am not a native speaker.
my resume is: choose that, what fullfills your needs best (also windows if you are a gamer)
and do not start flaming, that therefor windows fullfills most needs, because for the most functionality you have to pay (taking in account, if there would not be opensource windows programs like openoffice/gimp/firefox aso.).
The free CD’s have nothing to do wit their success
I think it has a bit to do with their success especially in the third that one of their target markets too. Broadband connections are still a rarity in many third world countries. You should also remember that even in the rich western countries (or Japan, Australia etc.) not nearly everyone has a broadband connection. Shipping free CDs is also an excellent advertising campaign and PR. Even if you don’t order your CDs, it might make you more interested in the project.
One thing I clearly found out when I was using Ubuntu is that Debian unstable (with apt-listbugs) is way more stable than Ubuntu’s “unstable” (=”Breezy”, even with apt-listbugs). That should be kinda natural though, as the Ubuntu Breezy is very bleeding edge, and it has been tested only for a short time yet.
When I was having enough problems with Hoary (partly my own fault though, having installed third party debs that were known to work with Debian…) I thougt to upgrade all the way to Breezy so that it would perhaps solve the dependency problems and broken packages. So I changed the sources.list, and first the upgrade seemed to go ok. But alas, after the upgrade, my X didn’t work, and after I had that fixed (by downgrading all X related packages to Hoary versions), I noticed that several other packages were broken too.
The point is: I never had that sort of problems when I was running Debian Unstable – and that is: for months without any breakage of things (so I used apt-listbugs, and tried not to install packages with open bugs).
It doesn’t make sense to compare how up-to-date the bleeding edge test versions of Ubuntu or Debian are, unless you also pay attention to the stability. I’ve now read about other people’s experience on the net, and for some Ubuntu Breezy works ok, while lots of other people besides of me, are having big troubles too. I guess that’s why they advice so strongly against upgrading from Hoary to Breezy yet on Ubuntu guides…
Metic: “especially in the third that one of their target markets too.”
Meant “especially in the third world that is one of their target markets too”, of course…
I would say that’s because Breezy is more the equivilent of ‘experimental’ than ‘unstable’/sid.
I would say that’s because Breezy is more the equivilent of ‘experimental’ than ‘unstable’/sid.
Yeah, you’re right. That’s what I thought too.
I’ve been impressed with SNAP for a long time, hopefully I can get this other laptop converted back to Linux soon so I can give this new release a test drive!
It looks like it has tons of support for not so well supported chips like my IGP340M.
I think that the free CDs must help in some way, if only because I myself am going to use Ubuntu for my first Linux Distro because I live in Alaska and have dialup. Next year when I get to Yale and I have a campus network I’ll be able to download other distros, but for me and many others the free CD idea is very nice. Plus, I ordered extras, as they encourage, and plan on handing them out to other people I think may enjoy installing Linux for a first time.
Although I like Ubuntu and its ‘sudo concept’ but still there is a limitation.
For eg. there was this root-readable only folder that a normal user can’t access.. so how do I access it?
$ sudo cd /foofolder
But that doesn’t work!
Instead I had to make a root account and then
$ su
and then
# cd /foofolder
A brief FYI: we recently certified SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux on Ubuntu Linux. Free download available at: