Ubuntu is under attack

[Jan Moren]

mån 2005-12-19 klockan 00:12 +0000 skrev Old Rocker:
> On Sunday 18 December 2005 23:17, Jan Moren wrote:
> 
> > Um, that's what kubuntu is for. Ubuntu is at heart a Gnome distro,
> > and with such a limited space on the CD, don't expect a large set of
> > packages like that to crowd out all the other useful or necessary
> > stuff.
> 
> I accept that there would be less space on the given-out CD, but does 
> everyone get and use Ubuntu this way?  My last two attempts to get 
> Ubuntu and Kubuntu were via download as an .iso file.  And I'm sure 
> that more could be put into an .iso download, even if that means 
> multiple disks for those that want them.

If you're getting stuff online, you're just one apt-get away from
everything in any case. I still think that the non-bloatedness of
getting a full system on one CD - the same full system you get from
booting a Live CD no less - is a truly good thing. As you say yourself,
if you want more, it's easy to get at in any case.


> Ubuntu IS a GNOME based distro, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be 
> more.  I've seen nothing about downloading Ubuntu into Kubuntu, which 
> (as I prefer KDE) seems to me to be an oversight.  And, yes, I have 
> looked at the wiki, although I am prepared to admit that I might have 
> missed it.

Well, I don't see an easy way to bring kubuntu to ubuntu either. 


> Debian moved slowly with bringing Sarge into stable, but it has promised 
> to bring forward future updates.  The problem is that Ubuntu is not 
> FULLY Debian compatible so we are forced to use those packages in the 
> Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories, and Ubuntu can't always install 
> applications that are in the Debian repositories  That's not giving 
> people choice.
> 
> I accept that Ubuntu/Kubuntu puts something back to Debian but we're in 
> danger of forking the whole Debian system, as well as removing that 
> stability that Ian Murdoch started Debian to maintain.  Nor am I 
> against a distro that puts as much on a CD as it can and that includes 
> GNOME.  What I am against is that it should be forging ahead without 
> including software that is Debian compatible.
> 
> And if the developers wanted to do so, couldn't they upgrade Ubuntu 
> every six months by basing it around fully Debian compatible software?

What would be the point? I mean, if you want the stability and
repositories of Debian, well, there it is. Don't install Ubuntu, install
Debian.

Again, actually following Debian would mean older versions of many
packages, and a major selling point of Ubuntu is precisecly that some
core packages are much more up to date than the Debian packages are. I
know I use Ubuntu in no small part because it follows the Gnome release
schedule and includes very recent versions of a lot of other stuff as
well (not the least all the tasty kernel-related work, with HAL and
Dbus, recent drivers and so on). To get there using Debian you pretty
much have to resort to building things yourself.

 There is a set of tradeoffs between stability, amount of fully
supported packages, supported architectures and recency. Ubuntu makes a
different tradeoff than Debian towards recency. That is _giving_ people
choice, not taking it away. 


-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren