I left Ubuntu clear back in 2008 when I saw very clearly that their developers (Especially in Canonical.) were starting to care less and less and less about what their community actually wanted. I saw the disastrous integration of Pulseaudio and how the developers and various "authorities" on their forum seemed to shout down or even go out of their way to discredit or silence critics of that move.
They totally ignored the fact that Pulseaudio, especially back in 2008, caused more problems than it solved and was a blatant case of a solution looking for a problem (To this day I have no issues at all whatsoever with straight up ALSA and still see very little tangible advantage to PA.).
But I didn't hop to Debian, I switched to Arch. At the time it seemed like a lot of users, if they were leaving Ubuntu, they were jumping ship to Arch. And it was for good reason, it offered way more choice than Ubuntu, and the developers generally didn't go out of their way deciding for you what you want, unlike Canonical in Ubuntu. For a very long time I used Arch, then Gentoo, and am still a big fan of both, since as far as choices and flexibility go they are leagues ahead of anything Debian could pull off without overhauling APT.
I largely left Arch because instead of the typical "developers force their favorite software on me" situation it was a combination of "too much RTFM in the community/oodles of arrogance on the part of the developers." One thing they did I do like, ironically since my criticism of PA, is the switch to systemd. The reason I drifted away from Gentoo was a seeming lack of direction and that it was getting to be a lot of work keeping conflicts down with USE flags. Not to mention for a rolling release, Gentoo seemed to move at a glacial pace in updating software (This in contrast to Arch which is pretty quick to getting up to date with upstream and VERY good at keeping the result from being broken.)
The reason I use Debian now is that I do like APT, and because I got a lot less time to tinker and play with Arch and Gentoo. My current circumstances don't allow me the time to do pre/post-upgrade maintenance the way Arch and Gentoo demand.
I like Debian. My only real beef with it is the DFSG. Debian developers (And a lot of users.) operate a little too much under the assumption end-users actually care about things such as source code being available and I do think this is why Debian is kept from being as popular as it could be. Great for forking distributions off of, however. While certainly, as a programmer, I can appreciate having source code for the software I use, I am way more a follower of the Torvalds philosophy ("Use what works best for you and your hardware." over the Stallman philosophy (The false notion that software being open source is some sort of moral issue.). You'll often see me on this mailing list ranting at someone who invokes "it's closed source, so it's automatically bad." Debian tends to go out of its way to appease the Free Software Foundation for zero benefit (Or respect from RMS.) whatsoever.
Perhaps my biggest technical gripe is a side effect of the Debian philosophy: Good luck ever actually installing Debian over a wireless network on their official media, as they shortsightedly decided that "philosophy" is more important than "install Debian on a laptop." Another gripe is how much they hold back mainstream Debian for their pet projects that stand very little chance of significant adoption (Debian kfreebsd: BSD is in a decline, and (Debian Hurd) I see very little point in Hurd, as the project is virtually dead.). This keeps Debian from switching to better stuff like systemd (Yes, I know systemd is in the repos.) that could make better use of the Linux kernel.
Conrad On 11/08/2013 11:57 AM, Alberto Salvia Novella wrote:
Note: Since I'm not subscribed to this mailing list at the moment, please send also a copy to my email when replying.----------Normally I write very short, like a Haiku <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku>; but I think this letter shall be the exception. So excuse me 😳*************** THE HISTORY ***************My name is Alberto Salvia Novella <https://launchpad.net/%7Ees20490446e>. Till 2008 I investigated how to create a Windows based reliable desktop computer system, till I did it and I realized nearly no one else will be able to do it without expending great amounts of time and money.One night I dreamed I had a very old looking but robust operating system installed on my computer, and eventually realized that what I should do is to look for something that was like what I saw. Although at the time I didn't know a thing about any other operating systems different to Windows or even libre software, I downloaded and tried in deep about fifty different operating systems from the time intensively for three years.Without reading a line of other people opinion, it seemed to me at the time Ubuntu was by far the best option in overall. But latter it went very buggy, and I began to pose myself why was that. What seemed more probable to me is Canonical chose to make radical decisions and, rowing against tide, selected to do something very different from what other distributions had done to the moment; in order to discover how they could make libre software to grow in popularity.Being between jumping to other distribution (Debian or Mageia) and giving this mind scope of Canonical a try, I decided five months ago the best action I could do was to get more involved with the project and empower it from its roots; and see what will happen and what the real problems are.After five months; the latest project coordinator of the "One Hundred Papercuts <https://launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts>" project, from Canonical, has asked me to take on the project. So; with the help of the team; I have redesigned branding and project goals, and have make a serious commitment to make it shine <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts%20will%20make%20Ubuntu%20shine>.************ THE POINT ************The point is yet very simple: I suspect Debian has a mindset that makes it stand out, I can imagine what kind of values these are, and I want them to become widespread. And now I feel I have the opportunity to show and convince the Ubuntu community to adapt them, and probable with it many people around the world.So I wanted to ask you the following question so it can't be said it's only my imagination. Summarizing:Which are the very important reasons why do you prefer Debian over Ubuntu?---------- Thank you for your help.