Marc's Public Blog - Linux Hacking

For the first year or two, I was happy with ubuntu, maybe all the way up to Gutsy or Hardy. It delivered on what I signed up for. But then, came a quite unfinished upstart, network manager suckage, non working pulseaudio for many releases, and an ever increasing amount of half baked crap.

Ubuntu switched from a better debian to some experimental distribution where shippping known broken stuff was ok, and even pushing experimental known unfinished stuff in an LTS was apparently ok. It became as bad or worse than Fedora Core, except Fedora Core never made a promise to be stable or make rational and generally 'safe' choices.

First, I started writing about it, and contacted several people at canonical to let them know how bad the non gnone non desktop experience was getting (and actually even the gnome/desktop experience was riddled with bugs), and after a few years, I eventually gave up and decided that enough was enough and switched back to debian, which is also what I'm doing at work (their loss, that's *many* machines):

At this point I drew a line in the sand, and decided to switch back from Ubuntu to Debian. Debian doesn't have an agenda of pushing half baked software or disruptive software to its users, and does its very best not to break compatibility, at least needlessly.

I figured I'd use the opportunity to switch to 64bit userland and start clean (everyone says I'm insane for never re-installing linux and keeping year old installs, like my debian servers that I've been upgrading for the last 10 years with no re-installs).

I made a debian bootable USB key with debian testing, and apart from a small UI bug in package selection, the install was pretty effortless.

In a nutshell:

My impressions so far?
It feels good to be with a system that I know will not randomly force crap I don't want, and that I can upgrade piecemeal. That doesn't make gnome less crappy, or network manager less unreliable, but it's debian, I've had 10 years with it, and I know they're the least likely to screw me in the future like canonical effectively has. Oh, the best part is that some of the package maintainers actually look at and respond to their bugs. How about that! :)

Here's to the next 10 years, debian! :)
(one year later: after the initial setup, debian has as expected worked quite well for me. I've been able to upgrade just what I needed when I needed it, and otherwise breakage was pretty much non existent).