Long live Debian!

After the Lenny release, nobody can say that Lenny is not a rock-solid OS. Furthermore, nobody can say that sid(unstable) is not bleeding edge enough. Especially after kde4.2 made it into sid. The kde4.2 upgrade process succeeded smoothly on my place. I've also "upgraded" my Lenovo X61 laptop from Ubuntu to Debian sid with a surprising success. I really feel better now, with Debian.

Still, when trying to convince people why Debian is superior than Ubuntu, it's hard to find the rational reasons. After all, Ubuntu is a Debian with more money and a larger community. After some thought, I've caught two possible reasons:

  1. Expert community: the average debian bug report is much more professional than an ubuntu bug, which is sometimes just a mess made of dozens of people saying "ohh it also happens to me!! please fixxx!". In other words, Debian users seem to be more tech savvis.
  2. KDE is quite a stranger in ubuntu. Kubuntu is quite uncommon, which makes it a little less intensively developed. In Debian there's no such partition. Debian is KDE as much as it's GNOME. I like KDE, so it feels more native to use Debian.

What do you think, why is Debian superior in your opinion? (or is it not..)

8 thoughts on “Long live Debian!

  1. Meir

    Sid is not bleeding edge. Debian took a long time for kde 4.2.2. Arch had it before it was even announced (so is Gnome and I'm not even talking about xorg-server with dri2).

    One of the reasons I'm on ArchLinux even though I like Debian (but hate it's deb packaging).

  2. Oren

    Hi Meir,

    Sid was frozen due to Lenny, for quite a long time. I was unpleased back then. But this post talks about nowadays. Since the Lenny release sid is very close to the bleeding edge, kde4.2 was waiting only due to this freeze.

  3. Meir

    Thanks for reminding me about the freezes. I hated those for all the many years of using Debian.

    I'm talking specifically about kde 4.2.2 and xorg-server which were released long after the freeze has been lifted, and kde 4.2 was already in sid. Same about Gnome (regardless of freeze periods, Debian takes long time to update those.

    Unstable shouldn't be "close to bleeding edge", it should be bleeding edge, period. IMO even during a freeze, Freeze testing and let Sid continue its stride.

  4. Shai

    A) No Meir, KDE 4.2.2 is the first KDE4 version in Sid. Before that KDE4 was only in Experimental (which is the true bleeding edge, BTW). 4.2.2 came into Sid a little less than a week after it was announced. KDE4 was not entered into Sid immediately when the freeze was removed, because the Debian release managers wanted to deal with large transitions one by one; thus, it took Sid a little more than a month to fully "thaw".

    B) I like Debian because Ubuntu has a tendency to be
    "helpful" in ways that make it more complicated to control stuff. I've had several incidents where simple commands or configuration changes, which always worked in Debian, were "overruled" in Ubuntu.

  5. Shai

    ... and about the freeze affecting Sid: They could have done it this way, of course, but then, they lose the involvement of Sid users in the stabilization effort. Considering that these are usually the people who make the quality bug reports Oren mentions (because they run into problems first), that seems like a waste of good resources. Of course, it leads some (like Meir) to quit Debian altogether... But all in all, I think if they kept Sid rolling while Testing was frozen, the next Stable would suffer. I like that Stable takes first precedence. YMMV.

  6. Meir

    Shay, I've included experimental (how else one could've used OO3 for a long time for example ?).

    I now all the reasons, but that's not change the outcome: sid is out of date for extended periods of time during each release.

    It all led to usage of Debian on servers only, I've stopped using it as a desktop (even Sid, which was my favorite).

  7. Basia

    I am going to stop using KDE.
    It is getting useless with all the useless plasmoids.
    Why it is impossible to let people choose screen with and without stupidities?
    I am VERY DISAPPOINTED by Debian KDE team.

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