Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu + Debian

john lewis wrote:

> I don't want to start any sort of flame war but I simply don't see
> what attracted _experienced_ Debian users and made them switch.
> Is it just that people have become brainwashed into wanting life made
> easy, so prefer gui interfaces for everyday admin tasks instead of
> doing it via an xterm?

At the time of Ubuntu's release (i.e before Sarge) it offered much that
Debian didn't. It still offers newer packages than Debian in general.
(Although Etch and Edgy will probably have pretty similar application
versions, the next Ubuntu release will come a lot quicker than Debian
and feature newer packages.)

But the main thing for me was the ease of connecting things like
printers, digital cameras and USB storage devices. Under Debian, it went
something like:

0) Open an xterm.
1) Attach device.
2) Check dmesg or syslog for the device it had been attached to.
3) Edit /etc/fstab with details for the device node and add user mount
options.
4) Mount at the command line.
4a) If that fails, run fdisk -l against the device to see what
partitions the device has.
4b) Then re-edit /etc/fstab with the new information and try again.
5) Navigate to wherever in /mnt it was mounted.
6) Use device.
7) Switch back to xterm.
8) Umount device.
8a) This probably fails as the xterm is probably still in the device's
mount path
8b) cd ~
8c) Umount again.
9) Unplug device.

Now, as an experienced Debian user this was still a pain. It slowed me
down when I could be doing more productive things at work and home. Even
setting up shortcuts or scripts to handle the device node detection and
mounting only worked until you plugged in a different device and all the
device nodes changes. This sort of stuff just doesn't happen with udev
and HAL etc. On Ubuntu I:

0) Attach device.
1) Window appears.
2) Use device.
3) Right-click device icon->Eject.
4) Remove device.

All the tracking of device nodes, partitions and file systems is handled
for me. Now, a lot of the above wouldn't happen in Etch as it has the
newer kernel/udev/HAL etc. that Ubuntu does. But you only have to be
ahead of the game for a bit to establish a significant userbase. I don't
care about all the crap I had to deal with in the first listing: As a
sysadmin I know roughly what's going on "under the hood" and I'm happy
to spend the cumulative saved seconds writing e-mails like this instead.
If I were a converting Windows user, I'd be used to my computer doing
these things for me and happy to let it continue to do so.

I know I can poke around my system at the CLI as much as I like. In
fact, I still do. There's nothing that forces users to use GUI tools
over CLI ones, it's just that a lot of people prefer them.

I also got tired of important apps in Debian unstable breaking for a day
or so. On my work systems particularly I can't have Firefox or OO.o not
work for a day, or spend that day hunting around for the bug report and
workaround. It's not unreasonable to want the newer applications that
are in Fedora or SUSE and to want them to run reasonably stably. So, the
greater stability of newer packages in Ubuntu over Debian and the fact
that all my sysadmin skills would transfer, it was a logical choice.

But I still use and like Debian. It's not a one-way street.

Tony