[OT] Ubuntu 8.10: headaches and nothing else.

[Peter Alcibiades]

Mikey-3 wrote:
> 
> 
> 2) On a client, why is Debian better?  For servers, you could make any
> argument for any distro and I'm sure it would make sense on one level
> or another, but I'm putting this on my lappie.
> 
> 

Its better because you don't have the upgrade/reinstall problem in the same
form.  The Debian releases are much less frequent. Etch, for instance, has
been out for a couple of years.  Within a release, you get the apps updated. 
However, within an Ubuntu release, you are not getting the apps updated,
just security fixes.  You may feel this doesn't matter, because Ubuntu does
a new release every six months or so.  But it does, because then you end up
in Ubuntu reinstall issues, as Richmond and you have found.

Debian is better because you are better off doing one major system upgrade
very two or three years, and keeping up to date in the meantime by doing
upgrades of the apps on a continuous rolling basis, rather than every six
months being faced with the choice to stay with the older releases of the
apps, or do a problematic clean reinstall.  Its not a sensible way of
running a distribution.

This is why Warren Woodford took Mepis back to Debian:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html

I would add that when you do want to do a total system upgrade, when Testing
is moved to Stable, on Debian, apt-get dist-upgrade does work.  Its been
properly tested.  Its impossible to do proper testing on dist upgrade if you
are trying to get it out every six months.  And the forums show that.

You have the same issue, though on an annual basis not a six month one, with
Mandriva, but the nice thing about Mandriva is that if you don't want to do
administration from the command line, you almost never have to.  For some of
us this veiling of the system in gui wizards is a positive disadvantage, but
it has the benefit that if you put in Mandriva for someone, and show them
the control center, they feel at home right away.  And with Mandriva, at
least recently, the clean installs of major releases, as long as you have
put /home on a separate partition, seem pretty foolproof.

Peter
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