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Ubuntu starts with Debian unstable (usually) and adds their own bugs. I fully expect it to break when updating. I had an enthusiastic period of Ubuntu and Fedo

by sethrin 14y ago

Ubuntu starts with Debian unstable (usually) and adds their own bugs. I fully expect it to break when updating. I had an enthusiastic period of Ubuntu and Fedora use. It seems stability is a virtue most appreciated in its absence; these days I use Debian stable and have largely forgotten about broken functionality. A few packages are pinned to testing, firefox and chromium were originally compiled from source and have been auto-updating since then. Unless you have a need for every package on your system to be recent to within a few years, you may want to consider using a system intended to be stable. There really is no possible substitute for a years-long testing cycle.

duaneb 14y ago
I do agree about debian, and were I to care about a long term installations I would probably go with that (or freebsd, depending on my needs). But again, I don't think that debian has the user friendliness that ubuntu does, in fact I can't think of any other distribution that works as well (that's not an ubuntu derivative itself). If you are interested, my typical use case is spinning up a vm for about 5-10 hours of total work while I port my code to linux, and ubuntu is simply the fastest way to do that without snapshotting a clean install (which I really should do).
- sethrin 14y ago
  Linux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies. Personally I'm using Crunchbang, which is minimalist, lightweight, based on Stable, and comes with a nice set of install scripts for web servers and databases and suchlike. Generally speaking though, if I were moving code between platforms, I would make sure that my staging environment matched whatever the production environment was -- I suspect not Ubuntu.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    Hmm, good to know. I don't write web stuff so production environment = generic linux distro, most likely to be ubuntu.

by sethrin 14y ago

duaneb 14y ago

I do agree about debian, and were I to care about a long term installations I would probably go with that (or freebsd, depending on my needs). But again, I don't think that debian has the user friendliness that ubuntu does, in fact I can't think of any other distribution that works as well (that's not an ubuntu derivative itself). If you are interested, my typical use case is spinning up a vm for about 5-10 hours of total work while I port my code to linux, and ubuntu is simply the fastest way to do that without snapshotting a clean install (which I really should do).

sethrin 14y ago
Linux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies. Personally I'm using Crunchbang, which is minimalist, lightweight, based on Stable, and comes with a nice set of install scripts for web servers and databases and suchlike. Generally speaking though, if I were moving code between platforms, I would make sure that my staging environment matched whatever the production environment was -- I suspect not Ubuntu.
- duaneb 14y ago
  Hmm, good to know. I don't write web stuff so production environment = generic linux distro, most likely to be ubuntu.