[members at lugog] Introduction:

[stoker]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:58:33 +0000, john lewis <johnlewis at hantslug.org.uk>
wrote:
> 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. 

understandable, red hat had similar sort of issues resulting in centos and
fedora 


> 
> 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.
> 
Me too for that matter


> 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 'releasing when ready' and think that Debian Stable is too out of date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. 
> 

well perhaps deb's developement team are well, a little cautious for your
liking, I can understand that.

> However that policy has resulted in lots of problems for people when
> upgrades have been released without having many bugs sorted out.

Exactly

 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. 
> 

Understandable, however adoption of new developments sometimes needs it,
especially around filesystem formats, could RH improve on their previous
record with that, sure, although its not as bad as it was... 



> 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. 
> 

now that is admirable, really, did that include on the pre 64 bit system
upgrading from say ext2 file system to ext3?

> Despite being the 'unstable' branch of Debian, sid is in fact quite
> stable enough for everyday use, at least for my fairly restricted
> needs. 

stable or not if it works fine, yes?

Occasionally there is a hiccup with upgrades but it is usually
> fixed within days at the most.
> 

Oh dear and I was getting hopeful, oh well back to centos....lol :-)

> My geneweb server runs on Debian stable and will be dist-upgraded
> once squeeze is officially relesed. 

I thinking of running a test box on squeeze when that release happens,
mainly for radius, but lenny does for now, I am looking forward to squeeze
tho...

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.

Well thats as good a reason as any, like I said if it works, fine..