"It's an Ubuntu World"

[John]

Old Rocker wrote:

> 
> Careful here.  Ubuntu is BASED on Debian but it is moving away from the 
> concept that Debian or Debian-based distros should work with any 
> package in each of the relevant Debian repositories.  Indeed, the 
> Ubuntu repositories hold software that is meant to be used with the 
> Ubuntu core alone.  Other packages from the Debian repositories MAY 
> work with Ubuntu, but they are not guaranteed to do so.  Even the 
> software downloaded by Automatix which is meant to work with Ubuntu is 
> not recommended by the Ubuntu developers as the software may break the 
> system.
> 

 From day one (I used pre Warty), Ubuntu has had its own repositories, 
and as far as I can recall, no guarantees regarding compatibility with 
Debian.

At the time, Sarge (then testing) and Ubuntu were in fact very similar 
and may did intermix packages.

A lot of the developers here are also Debian Developers: as far as I 
know changes made for Ubuntu are offered back to Debian.

> Ubuntu works well, but it is slowly moving away from the concept of 
> being a different installer for Debian software; it certainly has its 
> own repositories that hold software that cannot be run on other 
> Debian-like distros.  It has within it the dangers of a fork with 
> duplication of effort that is only to the detriment of the whole Debian 
> community.
> 
> The Debian installer has been a joke for some time, and although better 

Which Debian Installer?
Have you installed Sarge?


> now, it has caused several other Debian-based distros (amongst them 
> Libranet, MEPIS, and Knoppix) to produce a different core, a recompiled 
> kernel, and so on.  But as far as possible those distros are true to 
> the concept of using pure Debian packages.  Ubuntu has been different 
> from the beginning.

Knoppix uses a lot of SID, but there's also a signficant amount from 
outside Debian including, when last I looked, the hardware detection.


> 
> 
>>Ubuntu is also easily customizable, allowing you to completely change
>>the look of the Gnome desktop in just a few clicks.
> 
> 
> So is Libranet, and MEPIS uses KDE and it can do that as well.  Most 
> Linux distros do that, so I am not sure what point is being made here.
> 

One of Ubuntu's goals is to be easy to rebrand. That is not so of some 
other distros, particularly the major ones.