Debian Unstable vs. Ubuntu

[Rami Kayyali]

Well, I just figured out that I was trying to run Wine on AMD64, which
is, well, impossible (since it uses 32-bit binary DLLs). I didn't know
that JEdit doesn't exist in Debian either, except that as far as I
know, Debian's universe is much larger than Ubuntu's, I might be wrong
though.

To be honest, here are the things I like about Ubuntu so far:
- Very active community, most of the questions are answered almost
immedietly, and didn't I mention friendly :)  (trust me, I've been on
#debian, those people are elitist zelots)
- Most complete and stable port on AMD64 (followed closely by Gentoo,
but I'm not going to go into Ubuntu vs. Gentoo now, I'll post it later
on my blog).
- Security updates. Full-time staff employed to review packages.
- Constant updates. a 6-month release policy.
- Ability to compile everything from source.
- Did I say stable? As in, VERY stable?

My gripes with Ubuntu:
- To some degree, there's certain incompatibility with Debian
packages, I can't use Debian's repositories in Ubuntu and sleep sound.
- Too many Ubuntuized packages? Why not just merge with Debian?
- Still very small in comparison to other free (as in beer) Linuxes
(Fedora, Slackware, Knoppix, etc.)
- APT limitations. For instance, Gentoo's portage has much more to
offer, but still, to me APT is second best.
- Lack of proper documentation. Like I couldn't find any description
of the kernel's available with stock Ubuntu.


Other than that, I guess I'm sticking with Ubuntu for a while. The
only real competition I see is Gentoo and FreeBSD, Gentoo is my
personal favorite for many reasons, except it takes too much time to
get it to work.

At least now I know why Ubuntu and not Sarge or Sid :)

----
Rami Kayyali

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 18:31:12 -0800, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 07:10:47PM +0200, Rami Kayyali wrote:
> 
> > Well, security updates *are* a major factor in choosing one over the
> > other, but sometimes Ubuntu lacks the extensive support and
> > documentation Debian has, don't you think? Universe packages are also
> > an issue, I looked for software like JEdit and Wine in Hoary's
> > universe, but they weren't there.
> 
> Wine most certainly is available in Hoary/universe.
> 
> JEdit is not available in Debian or Ubuntu as far as I am aware.
> 
> --
>  - mdz
> 
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