On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 18:19 +0000, Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
My impression is that Debian is, on the whole, rock-solid, but it seems to me that the setup of /etc/apt/sources.list is less transparent than I would like!
Synaptic offers a GUI method of activating additional repositories, and even adding 3rd party ones.
On the other hand, Ubuntu is more liberal and seems to have more concern for "user happiness". But, that said, I can do without a lot of the Ubuntu "candy" -- I like a "clean & lean" system. And my main usage is in technical areas -- especially statistical and mathemtical computing, and typesetting, so I'd favour a distribution which caters well for those areas. On the whole, it seems Debian is well suited for that. My "test flights" of Ubuntu have not gone as far as digging deeply into its capabilities on such fronts.
There are plenty of Ubuntu flavours that offer a minimal type installation rather than the full gnome experience. Have a look at crunchbang or xubuntu.
I don't know what sort of packages you aren't finding in the debian repositories though. About the only thing I have found missing recently is cinepaint and given the state of the project as a whole I am not surprised they lost their Debian maintainer...I can't even contact the author at the moment to help him fix his sourceforge checkout scripts (all his email bounces with unrouteable address)
So, while I have also been considering an Ubuntu installation as an alternative to Debian, I'm not sure whether it is the wisest choice. My attitude to a Linux distribution is that, once set up and running, it will on the whole stay as it is while I just use it.
This is a potentially dangerous attitude because vulnerabilities such as the relatively recent OpenSSH weakness would leave you potentially open to attack or your machine open to attack others. Generally a standard apt-get upgrade will not do anything drastic like remove packages, modify configurations, jump major version numbers etc. Even if you have no open inbound ports you could still be sitting vulnerable to say a serious flaw in Firefox.
In short, on any networked OS always install the updates :)
One final question: Debian have very recently released their latest "stable" (5.0.0 "lenny" on February 14th, 2009). It seems that the next Ubuntu released is due in the very near future -- but I have not managed to discover a definite planned release date. Does anyone know?
April 23rd, 2009 although you can install it in alpha state today.
However if you don't like updating the OS every 6 months then I would recommend you sit on the last LTS release (8.04) as at least security updates will be available up to and beyond the next LTS release in April 2010, although of course running LTS means you are on older versions of everything.