Switch to Debian
Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 2:09 amI’ve finally decided to switch back to Debian. In fact, I did so about a week ago. Both my workstation and laptop now run Debian; and I’m much happier with Debian than I ever was with Ubuntu.
Way back when, I was one of the first people to switch to Ubuntu, under the promise of both Mark Shuttleworth and his people, and all of the Debian developers switching sides (apparently, since then, many of those developers either develop for both Debian and Ubuntu now, or switched back to Debian only), that Ubuntu would be what Debian was supposed to be: an easy to maintain, perfectly stable, often updated, desktop distro.
I believe, now, that Ubuntu is none of those things. Ubuntu, instead, is nothing but an attempt to turn Debian into something like Fedora: a desktop distro that puts user friendlyness over sane software development.
I deleted my /bin, /sbin, and /usr/* directories, and appended .old to /etc, /home, and /var, and used the 20060829 daily built Etch Debian-Install netinst CD to install in my already existing parition. I can say the new installer is way better than the one I used back in the Potato days (which was the last time I actually installed Linux on my workstation, I only dist-upgraded to Ubuntu instead of reinstalling).
I’m actually surprised how modern this installer is. For one, which surprised me, is that it automatically detects and sets up my Firewire port to be able to network on, the only flaw here is that it gives me an option of using eth1 as my default network adapter but doesn’t actually tell me eth1 is my Firewire port.
Second, it can automatically retrieve my computer’s hostname and domain because I statically assign IP and FQDN based on MAC with dnsmasq (which provides both dhcpd and dnsd) on my router. It saves me a few keystrokes, sure, but it is still a neat feature.
The only missing features I’d like to see is a mention of console output on F5, and a terminal on F2, which I only knew were there from previous experience with Debian installers. Plus, I’d also like to see the ability to add a pre-existing directory to use debs from, so I don’t have to re-download things if I already have downloaded them once.
After install, I quickly ugraded to Sid.
A few other things I noticed Debian has and Ubuntu doesn’t, is that Debian’s apt-get now has the abilty to download just the updated parts of a package index instead of the whole index (on supported mirrors, anyways). Even on DSL, downloading 5+ megs of package indexes takes a good 30 to 45 seconds, now it just takes less than 5.
In addition, and I’m not sure what caused this, I no longer have very sluggish apt-get performance when installing or removing packages. I think this may be because my Debian install was ancient and had eventually gotten dpkg‘s various state files gummed up, but where a simple apt-get install of a small package would take a few minutes, it now takes a few seconds.
All in all, Debian is still the distro I remember it: clean, lean, well designed, a dream to administer, and not bloated to hell and back with lots of defaultly installed packages no one uses. Also, is it me, or does Debian also boot a good ten seconds faster than Ubuntu?
well i have been thinking about leaving ubuntu after 3 years of using it thinking to myself is there any better possibility or something better to use. i see debian as a clear and better way to go on some things but in other ways not sure since the debian site is confusing. seeing what ubuntu has done to a the debian kernel makes me wonder if i should stay with more and more bad calls and the os requiring more and more ram to work good this is making me wonder if i am a contribution to linux i am happy with how much better ubuntu is compaired to windows and mac os x.5 and x.6 . i enjoy ubuntu alot but it seems to be missing something i cant put a finger on what its missing but its missing something. but windows and mac os is missing the boat too as something major missing in a os i dont know what it is maybe its time for me to distro shop again saybian/gentoo or fedora to find something that will better suit me. how far off is ubuntu compaired to debian ill know soon once i install it in a vm to take a look.
David, you do not have to reinstall Ubuntu or Debian to upgrade. Simply edit your
/etc/apt/sources.list, and where it saysbreezy(codename for 5.10), just change it todapper(codename for 6.06) in all places wherebreezyappears. Then doapt-get updateandapt-get dist-upgradeto upgrade all your packages.Debian and Ubuntu are both designed to install once, and upgrade many. Its only Windows that talked people into doing otherwise.
Indeed, I have tried Ubuntu, since 5.10, and would have tried 6.06 if the installer would not completely freeze midway on the system I was trying it on. Also tried whatever version was between those two.
Ubuntu was a good idea, but overdone, yet underdone. I for one wouldn’t necessarily use its LAMP setup either, as it likes to toss the word Ubuntu all over the system. Debian does something similar, but some reason less annoying.
Ubuntu installs too much crap by default, Coyote. Sure, I can install it using the “server” profile, or I can use the Desktop task on Debian and do the same thing, but Debian offers one thing Ubuntu does not: a plain “light” Gnome meta package, that doesn’t include OpenOffice and a dozen other applications that just bloat things up.
I’m really not sure what you mean, I’ve used both Debian and Ubuntu and been quite happy with both. My secondary fileserver runs Debian Sarge, my laptop and main desktop run Ubuntu Dapper. I haven’t found Ubuntu a bit harder to administer or customize-all the good stuff still works. Of course, though I well know how to mount a drive, it’s nice not to have to -do- it every time I plug in my USB flash drive…
Except you fail to mention the root cause: the sysadmin of the machine failed to patch the kernel. That, and I do in fact remember this happening: Sid _did_ ship a patched kernel, the sysadmin failed to install a new kernel on gluck.
Gah! I feel temptation to start a blog ranting about Debian’s flaws…
Just an example:
Gluck.debian.org was rooted sometime before 2006 July 12. ( http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060713 )
The vulnerability that was exploited was present in the kernels shipped by Debian, but they didn’t release a security advisory about it to this day. The next kernel advisory released by Debian was on July 26, but it was about an other issue (CVE-2006-3626 versus CVE-2006-2451). However, Debian unstable (which runs on gluck) still shipped the vulnerable kernels for weeks after the compromise.
Oh yeah and CVE-2006-2451 was assigned on May 18, for almost 2 months nobody noticed at Debian that their own box is rootable.
They can’t even keep their own servers secure.
“Boot” actually. I really need to proof-read harder before posting.
Do you mean “load” in the last sentence of this particular blog post?
I never said those people were sane. FreeBSD and Debian are the only things I’d ever consider for servers; and Debian is the only thing I’d ever consider for a desktop or workstation.
Because Fedora is so desktop oriented that kernel.org runs it. In fact, the majority of colo servers I’ve seen run either CentOS, Fedora, or FreeBSD…
And I am a Debian user (with interruptions).
I could, but I’ll probably save that for a future rant. Though, I may never get to such a rant because Fedora simply isn’t relevant in the Linux world anymore. Ubuntu has almost single-handedly replaced all major desktop-oriented distros.
>Fedora: a desktop distro that puts user friendlyness over sane software development.
Could you elaborate?
Hi
Ubuntu is an End User distribution. What did you expect from it?
Glad people are getting over Ubuntu though. It was just a damn fad anyways. I used it for a month and deemed it a pain to use as a developer platform. It also ran slow as hell compared to a custom Debian/Gentoo install.
The only thing I miss was the seamless device usage in Ubuntu, such as popping in a CD-ROM put an icon on the desktop, opened a window, and of course granted you the permissions to access it. I set the same thing up with hald and d-bus, but it’s definitely not as clean as Ubuntu’s implementation.
At least Ubuntu did one thing right: GNOME.
Other than that, it’s just a crippled version of Debian.