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etch, sid, or ubuntu?

sourceninja

sourceninja

Diamond Member
I've got a new machine and I decided that I want to give debian or ubuntu another chance. This will be a desktop machine.

Should I run etch, sid, or the latest ubunut?
 
For a desktop, I'd go Ubuntu.
For a development workstation, I'd go Etch.
For a production server, I'd go Sid.
 
For a production server I wouldn't go with Sid. That's 'unstable'.

Maybe your thinking of 'Sarge'?

Sarge is what you'd use if you want something that 'just works'. You have a server to setup or you have a bunch of desktops/workstations to setup. Debian has some very advanced management tools/technics that makes Debian Stable probably the most low-administration-overhead operating system that I know of. Updates are rare and far between.. Just security updates mostly.

Sid is just the opposite. Routenely your downloading hundreds of megs of updates every week. Things break regularly. It's very high maintainance.

Use Sid if you want to be cutting edge with most software. When Ubuntu releases it's version it's a snapshot of Debian sid (pretty much) with newer GNOME, some user-friendly mods, newer X, and other Ubuntu tweaks added on... It's newer for a little while, but after a month usually Debian Unstable has newer stuff. (there are a few exceptions, of course, like Debian still would use python 2.3) Debian Sid is continiously updated.

Etch is nice depending on what is going on in Debian-land. It's goal is to be the next stable.. not to be usuable in it's development stage.. Although due to the nature of Debian development it's usually pretty decent. Usually much less of a headache then Sid.

Ubuntu is good for newer users. It's a very good home distro. You get new stuff and then small updates, with big updates every 6 months or so. Although there are things that Ubuntu does that piss me off and I don't think quality control is as good as Debian... Although for Dapper they delayed it's release for that specfific reason (testing it more). I think that they still do a very good job though.

One thing that improves the desktop usability of Sarge is the unofficial Debian backports. These are specific groups of packages from Testing/Unstable that have been recompiled specificly to work with the current Debian stable. So things like newer KDE or newer Gnome.

I think that Debian still has too high of a learning curve for newer Linux users.
 
Originally posted by: drag
For a production server I wouldn't go with Sid. That's 'unstable'.

Maybe your thinking of 'Sarge'?
Click to expand...

You are correct, I was thinking Sarge. I've got a couple redhat/fedora boxes going and, as time passes, I wish I had gone debian stable. Eventually I'll make the switch.
 
I'm mostly concerned with staying up to date on desktop programs (firefox, mplayer, gnome, etc). I'm a long time gentoo user so there will be a slight learning curve as I get used to using to the package management. I guess it really comes down to sid or ubuntu.

Really all I want on this box is
gnome 2.14
totem-xine
bluefish
cedega
gnumeric
abiword
some video editing and conversion tools
rtorrent
development tools (gcc 4.1, and all the goodness for developing linux apps)

I just like my stuff to be up to date and easy to maintain.
 
Originally posted by: doornail
Originally posted by: drag
For a production server I wouldn't go with Sid. That's 'unstable'.

Maybe your thinking of 'Sarge'?
Click to expand...

You are correct, I was thinking Sarge. I've got a couple redhat/fedora boxes going and, as time passes, I wish I had gone debian stable. Eventually I'll make the switch.
Click to expand...

I'm in the exact same boat. Gradually dipping my toes in Debian in hopes of replacing my CentOS servers.
 
Do you have to use the ubuntu server install disks to customize your ubuntu install? I dont want half the crap ubuntu-desktop installs by default. hmm maybe debian sid is still the better option.
 
From the ubuntu-desktop package in synaptic: It is safe to remove this package if some of the desktop system packages aren't desired. However, it is reccomended you keep it installed because it is used to carry out certain upgrade transitions.

It looks like you can remove the default programs in Ubuntu, but I've never tried.
 
Originally posted by: sourceninja
Do you have to use the ubuntu server install disks to customize your ubuntu install? I dont want half the crap ubuntu-desktop installs by default. hmm maybe debian sid is still the better option.
Click to expand...

You can use the "alternate" install image. Not sure if it lets you changes packages or not.
 
i dont use openoffice, the bittorrent tracker, and a few other things (all those crappy games it installs) I'd rather not have on my box. There is not a lot to prune, but there are a few things I just dont want. I like as clean of a system as possible.
 
I'd stick with sid, it's easy to track current packages (as long as you're smart about your upgrades) so you never have to do a full upgrade between releases.
 
So the next question is apt-get, synaptic, or aptitiude?

You gotta love learning all the tools and tricks all over again.
 
Really it doesn't matter, they all use apt underneath. Aptitude has a nice feature in that it'll remember which packages are installed automatically as dependencies and remove them when you remove everything that depends on them.
 
I found this very usefull.
http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/
It's the Debian GNU/Linux Desktop Survivial Guide. It's packed full of good information and tips and it should answer most of your question. Otherwise Debian has excellent documentation on their website, but it's very dry and hard to follow sometimes.
http://www.debian.org/doc/

Also there is newbie oriented websites like:
http://www.debianhelp.org/ "Militantly FREE software support."
and also
http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Articles "Debian newbiedoc Wiki" (for newbies by newbies)
They have good stuff like how to make a custom kernel into a Debian kernel package you can then install on your machine or bunches of machines and have it fuffill dependancies and be easily installable/uninstallable.

Using that stuff you should be up to speed on using Debian pretty quickly if you dive into it and have a decent amount of time.

Also as a bonus 95% of it is directly relevent to Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros.

edit:
For administrative specific stuff other then the official manuals from Debian you have:
http://www.debian-administration.org/ which has good articles about different odd things you may want to do as a administrator. Good learning resource.

Also there is the Debian Wiki which is something that is relatively new.
http://wiki.debian.org/
 
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