Re: Attracting newbies (Was Booting Debian/testing fails)
On 05 Feb 2007, Michael Pobega wrote:
[snip]
>
> I don't mean to change the subject, but I myself used Ubuntu because I
> felt that Debian was way too outdated for me. Then after multiple system
> breakages I decided to just switch over to Debian, and it ended up
> working fine. Debian has all the positives of Ubuntu (apt, deb files,
> etc.) without all of the negatives (I hate having to do a dist-upgrade,
> especially in Ubuntu since in Ubuntu it breaks your system 80% of the
> time). When I first came to the Debian community, I was told that I
> should go give Ubuntu a shot, and I did. And as Andrew said, I
> inevitably ended up crawling back to Debian and settled with the
> (Somewhat out of date) testing distribution. And to boot, I was so happy
> when I (Just yesterday) changed my sources.list from etch to testing,
> because now I'll never have to do a distro upgrade again.
>
[snip]
I've been using Debian (Sid) exclusively for 4-5 years now. However, as
I've posted elsewhere on this list, when I bought a new Thinkpad Z61M
last week I had a lot of problems with getting Sid to work properly. The
wireless wasn't recognized and, more seriously, nor was the sound. I
struggled for two days, but in spite of a lot of helpful advice from
people here and elsewhere it still wouldn't work. I therefore tried
Ubuntu and both wireless and sound worked out of the box.
I've now configured Ubuntu so that it works much the same as Debian;
i.e. using wajig instead of synaptic, icewm as window manager, etc. And
I've installed Debian on a separate partition so that I can still use it
if I want (and perhaps try sound again later).
I have to admit that I'd always thought of Ubuntu as an easy-to-install
Debian aimed principally at refugees from Windows, but my experience so
far has been a lot more positive. Debian is still my distro of choice
and it's running on my desktop and an older Thinkpad, but I'm grateful
to the Ubuntu people for getting me out of a serious difficulty.
Anthony
--
Anthony Campbell - ac@acampbell.org.uk
Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
on-line books and sceptical articles)
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