Re: Why Debian
On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 12:44 PM, <berenger.morel@neutralite.org> wrote:
> Le 19.11.2013 21:26, Nemeth Gyorgy a écrit :
>>
>> Actually it is not a distro fork. The pool of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu,
>> <whatever>ubuntu is the same (the sources.list is the same for all). You
>> can consider the different 'distributions' as different install sets for
>> the same distribution with different default environments and settings.
>> There are metapackages for all the 'distributions' so choosing one or
>> another is just an apt-get install and selecting the newly installed
>> desktop as default.
>
> So, why people feels the need to give them different names? And, if I
> understand things at least a little, examples like KUbuntu are no longer
> supported by Canonical, so they are unofficial, so they can not be called
> the same distro.
>
> Take any other distribution:
> _ Debian
> _ ArchLinux
> _ Mint
> _ Fedora
>
> None of them have different names for different DEs, AFAIK.
This is one thing that Ubuntu's done very well.
If you want Unity, you download an Ubuntu Live CD that boots into
Unity and installs Unity.
If you want KDE, you download a Kubuntu Live CD that boots into KDE
and install KDE.
Lather, rinse, and repeat for the other DEs.
Prepending the DE start letter was a brilliant idea. Would you have
preferred that they name these CDs ubuntu.iso and ubuntu-kde.iso in
more or less the same way that Debian calls its GNOME and KDE CDs
debian-7.2.0-amd64-CD-1.iso and debian-7.2.0-amd64-kde-CD-1.iso? Ot
that they called their different DEs Ubuntu-Unity, Ubuntu-KDE, ...? In
the UK you disembark from a plane and in the US you deplane. OMG,
where's the firing squad? Someone's wrong!
They've ensured that the different DEs and their installers are easily
identified for their users. But you can install any DE and then
apt-install any other DE, so Ubuntu behaves in this regard like any
other distribution.
To make things more confusing, earlier this month XFCE became
tasksel/d-i's default desktop [1] so a user could download the plain
CD1 expecting to install GNOME and get XFCE. It's "testing" so it's OK
but it's not the most straightforward move from a user's perspective.
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