Debian VS Ubuntu, considering jumping distros

Right now I'm considering another distro for when upgrade time comes. Ubuntu as of late has been getting quite a few questionable changes made to it including the inclusion of this hydra known as pulseaudio and of course the window controls. Can somebody tell me how different Debian is from Ubuntu? From what I've gathered it seems that this is a more conservative and less bleeding edge distro than Ubuntu and has less problems, but I don't know because I've never messed around with it. Would I have to strip out pulseaudio or go through any other annoyances like that?

Ubuntu is just a bloated perversion of Debian. Think of Debian as Ubuntu without all the crap.

I usually do a base install and then add the rest of the software myself, that way i get things the way i want. But i guess that could be considered an annoyance... There is however a dist called Crunchbang Linux which is based on Debian Squeeze, it's a pretty nice system straight out of the box.

The real annoyance is stripping out all the crap lol they currently got pulseaudio so far entrenched in the distro you have to use hacks if you don't your audio broken after removing it. Ubuntu 7.10 was pretty good, but Canonical seems to have let the distro just go downhill from there, hell it's going to have somewhat of an identity crisis pretty soon due to them trying to make it so much like Mac OS X.

The real annoyance is stripping out all the crap lol they currently got pulseaudio so far entrenched in the distro you have to use hacks if you don't your audio broken after removing it. Ubuntu 7.10 was pretty good, but Canonical seems to have let the distro just go downhill from there, hell it's going to have somewhat of an identity crisis pretty soon due to them trying to make it so much like Mac OS X.

In their effort to make it look and work Windows and Mac they have lost the Linux experience. It's actually very sad because when people try Ubuntu they hope for something new and different, instead they get raped by a big pile of steaming manure. The really sad part is that most of them are so use to that "one operating system, one experience"-mentally that they believe Ubuntu is the Linux experience.

I kissed Debian and I liked it.

It sounds like you are a person who does a lot of customizations yourself. If that is the case, you'd probably be better served by Debian (unstable, not testing), as it gives you (mostly) vanilla packages from which you can customize without first having to "backtrack". Given that you're already used to Ubuntu (and thus apt-get, sudo, etc etc) Debian would be a good fit.

I was in the same boat as you a year or so back - I got tired of backing out so many Ubuntu changes; I'd be endlessly removing NetworkManager, mono, manually installing madwifi, blah blah blah. I ended up going back to Arch linux because they offered simple packages.

I prefer Debian Testing!!Only when is necessary i install something from a bad guy like Sid....and the stable is the better choice for servers but for the Desktop use is a bit outdate...

Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means "cant configure debian"
All the fucking graphic tweak of ubuntu are the evil :I hate them!!!!

Ubuntu is just a bloated perversion of Debian. Think of Debian as Ubuntu without all the crap.

Where crap = Unity, retarded window controls, Mark Shuttleworth, "Ubuntu Software Center", plymouth, etc. IMO pulse isn't that bad, but a lot of people seem really annoyed after others pointed out that it provides per-application volume control. I've never ever had pulse crash, but sometimes it *can* be a bit confusing. In the ideal world, we'd all use JACK, which is truly awesome

Having said all that, I'm using a computer with Ubuntu *right now* because it's used by others who aren't comfortable with how linux works, and if I tried anything else it would most likely drive them crazy

Most of the time I use Arch because it is so simple and bar breakage induced by the crazy package managers WHO DECIDED TO MAKE /usr/bin/python PYTHON 3, it almost never breaks

> Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means "cant configure debian"

Actually it's for "I can't install Gentoo".

WHO DECIDED TO MAKE /usr/bin/python PYTHON 3

Oh yeah, annoys me all the time. Other than that, I love Arch. I've been using Ubuntu before until it hit version 9.10 (9.04 was quite okay if we disregard that damned pulseaudio, the devil of sound), which was just full of breakages. I love the Arch way: it's concept of simplicity, lack of preinstalled clutter (I don't have to remove what I don't need, but rather install what I need, unlike in most "user-friendly" distributions such as Ubuntu), and the "do it yourself" approach which makes you learn alot faster (and excellent documentation on the official wiki makes it very easy). The rolling-release system is simply awesome: their releases are just snapshots of core packages, which are intended for new installations only. It takes just one command to fully upgrade your system. No matter how old your install is, you can always get the newest packages easily, which is quite problematic in Ubuntu: I remember compiling irssi 0.8.13 from source because 9.04 was simply stuck with 0.8.12, which had a very annoying bug that I couldn't stand.

> Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means "cant configure debian"

Actually it's for "I can't install Gentoo".

sigged

Seriously, Gentoo is awesome. You can configure it as much as you want. It doesn't install bloat unless you ask for it, isn't tied to a specific DE or WM, and the package manager, portage, is the most flexible I have ever seen. Packages are more up-to-date than Ubuntu and bugs are fixed much faster. There are no "distribution upgrades"; instead, the portage tree is continuously upgraded.

I haven't tried this, but it looks good: Zorin OS

Says it runs Windows applications faster than Windows.

*shrug* just though I'd mention it.

> Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means "cant configure debian"

Actually it's for "I can't install Gentoo".

No, You're confusing it with "Toorox" or "Sabayon".

Debian all the way!
Or Aptosid, and for comfort's sake there's Novell's openSUSE Build Service.

Did some googling and now MEPIS is looking pretty good. Anybody have any thoughts/experience with it? I'm still semi-new to Linux distributions (only been my main OS for three years now, unlike Windows) and something with a similar feel to Ubuntu or Mint minus the suck would be nice. The only other distros I screwed around with were Damn Small (because the only computer I had access to after my previous rig blew up had no HDD because it died!) and I did toy around with regular Debian on another system before. Still not sure if I should be looking at Debian or another derivative of it, what do you think?

Try tiny core, it's 6mb. But for reals, Gentoo is a real mans distro. The only...higher level of geek cred attainable with Linux is LFS.

But unlike Gentoo, LFS makes things worse, not easier. Even if you know what's going on in your system.

Lee_Stricklin, if you used Ubuntu you should feel right at home with plain Debian. *Any* other (except user-ready like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE) distribution will *require* you to spend some time to learn some stuff.

Currently screwing around with MEPIS on another system right now and outside of having to put with that trainwreck we call KDE (I H A T E this desktop environment) long enough to get GNOME installed from synaptic, I'm liking it. I'll probably be giving straight Debian a go soon before I decide which I want to load on my main rig.

I've been running Arch for a few years now and really like. The dissapointment I've had recently has been with KDEmod parting company to do Chakra. I always preferred the KDEmod build as it meant modularisation and hence only having the packages installed that you needed. As much as I like the philosophy of Chakra in having a pure modularised KDE environment, I've seen this before with how Sabayon started.

I don't want to spend days putting in manual effort into getting an OS working anymore. There seems to be this awful snobbery in some Linux circles that you are more elite if you spend more time configuring your system. My time is expensive nowadays. My daily rate is more than most people would spend on a computer and right now I only use my computer on the occasions that I'm home, given that the journeyman stage of my career necessitates a lot of travel.

Yet somehow I have an inkling to go back to Gentoo. Not because I want to make life hard. I want to make life easy by only having on my system the things I need (a modularised KDE is a big bonus) and using USE flags to negate ridiculous dependency chains whereby you need libtinylittlelibthatnothingelseneedsbutrequiresyouinstallhalfofgnome.so.1 for no well explained reason. Done properly Gentoo can be very good. The fact I'd only do a system update once a month or less doesn't make the compile time much of an issue and I can avoid massive dependency chains.

When I do finally make it and settle down, maybe I will just pay someone else to administer my computers for me. I'm trying to hand over technical service stuff at work to someone else so that I can take up the more important stuff, why not do the same at home? Or maybe just buy an off the shelf computer preloaded with Windows...

Anyway, Arch still seems good. Better still if KDE 5 goes more modular there would be no need for KDEmod anyway, vanilla KDE in Arch would be modular!

Exitium, making a distribution requires you to make a few mutually exclusive desitions. Debian is not an exception. You can't make a distribution that won't be worse than some other at some point.

Exitium, making a distribution requires you to make a few mutually exclusive desitions. Debian is not an exception. You can't make a distribution that won't be worse than some other at some point.

I didn't make that picture, just found it somewhere from the internetz.

It's not 100% my opinion, but somehow expresses that.

Exitium, making a distribution requires you to make a few mutually exclusive desitions. Debian is not an exception. You can't make a distribution that won't be worse than some other at some point.

I'm beginning to think that's just an excuse to not do everything properly from the start.

i hate computers.

To make packages configurable you need to build them from sources. To make them easily and quickly installable you need to have prebuilt binaries. Prebuilding all configurations will result in a combinatoric explosion.

Have fun doing the universally right thing.

i was using windows 7 about 4 days ago. decided to install Ubuntu because all you nerds kept saying windows is crap Linux is better, so OK ill try it out.

so far all ive gotten is problems.

the only thing ive liked in it is that it was very easy to get xonotic git.

windows is so much easier to use and it also looks better.

i haven't given up on Linux YET but it better hurry up and surprise me with something awesome.

i was using windows 7 about 4 days ago. decided to install Ubuntu because all you nerds kept saying windows is crap Linux is better, so OK ill try it out.

Remember that this is some sort of epic religious battle that's going on for quite a while already. There will always be fanatics on both sides, and I always recommend not to listen to fanatics.

Windows has its pros, as it has its cons. The same goes for Linux, plus you find a lot of versions of Linux that, too, have their pros and cons. Then there's MacOS, that also has pros and cons. My own experiences with all of those OSses are roughly as follows:

Windows: most hardware works out of the box, you can work very professionally and fast if you learn how, and like, to use keyboard shortcuts, you are likely to find some software that does more or less exactly what you want, but you'll have to pay for it. Security got better, but Windows still is the most common target for malware.

Linux: You get a lot of control over what's happening, though for most people it's more control than they can handle. You can customize everything and can adapt the system so it works exactly according to your needs, including powerful keyboard shortcuts and advanced scripts. You are likely to find some software that does exactly what you want for free, but it's likely to be still in pre-release stadium. You can help developing it in most cases, though. Hardware support is tricky sometimes. Linux is likely to require you to use the terminal for advanced configuration. You probably need to break things knowingly to make Linux insecure.

MacOS: You get a system where almost everything works like charm and is very intuitively to operate even if you don't have a clue about computers. The reduction of complexity comes for the price of reduction of possibilities. You'll probably find software that offers the capabilities the system is lacking, but you'll need to pay for it. Privacy and freedom are limited. MacOS requires a mouse for almost anything. It ships with a cool terminal console, though, which then offers extended possibilities to geeks.

My choice is currently still Ubuntu, though I am not so happy about the direction Ubuntu is going. I am considering jumping to another distro as well, someone mentioned Arch Linux offers very up-to-date packages and Gentoo looks interesting to me as well (though I am not so confident I'll manage to install it properly - all those hardware questions, how the heck am I supposed to know which exact chipsets are residing on my mainboard?! I am not sure I want to do all that research...).