[Gllug] Ubuntu (Was: Re: Help !!!!)

[Jan Kokoska]

On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 15:35 +0100, Steve Nelson wrote:
> have a use for it personally.  Does sound like it might be viable for
> putting on someone's newish machine as an introduction to Linux,
> though.

Or actually make Debian unstable usable? Don't get me wrong, I run it
for 4 years and you bet I have fought some battles for my distribution.
But release strategy "when it's ready it's ready" is a bad joke, which
has more importantly proved to *not work* in practise.

They got overwhelmed, supporting 11 architectures, with close to 18,000
binary packages in the largest one right now[0], anyone would have
trouble with that. So nobody else dares.

Result is no stable release in Debian for over two years[1] and hence no
security updates for it. Production systems cannot afford to use
unstable because apart from security updates the majority of changes are
in features, which unavoidably break running applications.

You can either use backports[2] and hope you will get all you need (in
vain) or lauch your own testing branch for every package in unstable
that you will roll out to your systems. Can keep a few people busy for
sure.

Also making the default installer suck so much as to get rid of the
lusers who would otherwise flood mailing lists was not the best World
Assimilation strategy now, was it?

I am immensely grateful someone (Mark Shuttleworth [3], Ubuntu SABDFL)
finally picked up the idea of making Debian actually *work* by default. 

Ubuntu offers: 6-month stable releases, 18-month support for each,
making the number of branches bearable and including only what they
managed to get to work by default. That's why you don't get KDE in
Ubuntu 4.10 (version as in August 2004), because no developers use
it^H^H^H^H... is not so popular among Debian developers.

Also, they only support architectures someone has actually seen running
somewhere else than museums and academia, who should find it a pleasure
to fix their Debian the way it is. Like I did with my AlphaServer which
took about month to get fully running and about a year to sell
afterwards.

I hope support from Canonical [4] doesn't dry out and people will be
motivated to fix Ubuntu for all possible currently used setups (recent
laptops, servers etc..). Currently, it is gaining massive momentum
(mailing list has close to 3,000 posts in two weeks of September[5]),
which is only surprising for people who were not involved for the last 6
months before it went public.

Counting down some two weeks before I start teaching Linux sysadmin
workshops in my local technology center, and guess what distro I am
going to use ;) Their chief admin is happy about it and even recommends
Ubuntu to other people on our LUG meetings.

Jan

[0] $ apt-cache search . | wc -l
17835

[1] http://www.debian.org/News/2002/20020719

[2] http://www.backports.org/

[3] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

[4] http://www.canonical.com/

[5] http://lists.ubuntulinux.org/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users

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