[Gllug] Linux box keeps rebooting

Stephen Harker steve at pauken.co.uk
Thu Dec 8 22:48:04 UTC 2005


Jack Bertram wrote:
> * Martin A. Brooks <martin at hinterlands.org> [051208 21:21]:
>> Jack Bertram wrote:
>>> Well, the reason I moved away from Debian was that it didn't update
>>> often enough - for a server, it's fine but for a desktop where I want to
>>> play with cool stuff as well as the basics, it's a real pain.
>>
>> If you want to play with toys you can.  That's why debian has testing, 
>> unstable and, Bob help you, experimental.
>>
>> You can have as much bleeding edge gore as you want.
> 
> In my experience, debian's stable is rock-solid and great for servers,
> testing is ok but not up-to-date, and unstable just doesn't work well
> enough.
> 
> I don't want my desktop to break all the time, I just want to be able to
> try new apps when I can.

Try Ubuntu then. It's the same Debian technology but with a more 
frequent release schedule and lots of shiny desktop stuff. You can have 
the latest stuff and a stable desktop too. And it has an upgrade path 
that seems to work properly.

For instance, KDE 3.5 was released the other week and within a day or so 
there were ubuntu packages for it. I'm expecting KDE 3.5 to show up in 
Debian unstable and eventually testing within the next couple of months 
but if you are running Ubuntu, it's there now.

If you are in to Gnome (cue tiresome desktop environment discussions), 
then the releases of Ubuntu tend to coincide with releases of the Gnome 
desktop too. Gnome 2.12 has been out since October but I don't think 
it's even made it to Debian unstable yet (it's probably in 
Experimental). Yet it is there in Ubuntu in the "stable" release.

BTW, this isn't a Debian vs Ubuntu bash, I'm just pointing out that for 
a desktop, Debian isn't necessarily the best distro if you want the 
latest and greatest as soon as it's released. Having said that, I 
wouldn't personally put Ubuntu on any server I was particularly worried 
about for a while yet but I'm sure it would be fine.

Stephen
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