[members at lugog] Introduction:

[john lewis]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 08:58:11 +0000
stoker <stoker at headweb.co.uk> wrote:

> You say your anti ubuntu, care to expand on that point? I don't ship
> it myself as I'm more likely to be able to support RH and derived
> product because of my experience with that system. However if they
> want ubuntu, they get it.

It goes back to when *buntu first came on the scene and lots of people
I knew who had been staunch Debian users abandoned it for *buntu for
no apparent reason. I still don't understand why they did so as
*buntu didn't seem to offer any benefits over Debian or any of the
other offshoots at the time. 

Shuttleworth 'poached' quite a number of Debian developers but in
the early days there seemed to be quite a bit of friction between those
developers who hadn't succumbed to the temptation of paid work and
those who did due to the perception that *buntu was getting the benefit
of years of Debian development and giving nothing back. 

Now I am not a developer, not even a programmer, just a user of
Linux for a specific purpose so don't have insider knowledge of what
actually goes on at developer level and can only guess at problems from
the occasional blog I read on Debian Planet.

I do accept that a lot of people don't like the Debian policy of only
'releasing when ready' and think that Debian Stable is too out of date
so like the fixed release cycle adopted by *buntu. 

However that policy has resulted in lots of problems for people when
upgrades have been released without having many bugs sorted out. And
it does seem to mean that it is difficult to upgrade without having to
re-install, one of the reasons I stopped using RedHat back in the 5.1
era. 

By contrast I haven't needed to re-install my Debian sid system since I
installed it 10+ years ago, other than a new install when I upgraded
my system to a 64bit AMD one two years ago. 

Despite being the 'unstable' branch of Debian, sid is in fact quite
stable enough for everyday use, at least for my fairly restricted
needs. Occasionally there is a hiccup with upgrades but it is usually
fixed within days at the most.

My geneweb server runs on Debian stable and will be dist-upgraded
once squeeze is officially relesed. My 'testing box' currently has
testing installed but my Vario laptop has sid and the Asus netbook uses
DebianEeePC so am strictly a Debian user.

I do fairly regularly install other distros using VirtualBox to see
what is going on but so far nothing has even begun to tempt me away
from Debian.

-- 
John Lewis
using Debian sid