
Moving from Ubuntu to Debian - autotravis
http://magnatecha.com/moving-from-ubuntu-to-debian/
======
networked
So, is the Linux distribution market now ripe for disruption?

I wonder who out of today's major players could be the next big thing.
OpenSUSE seems the closest to Ubuntu in terms of user friendliness (Linus'
comments notwithstanding) due to tools like YaST [1] and a PPA-like mechanism
called the openSUSE Build Server for extra prebuilt software [2]. People
certainly have speculated about it online for a while but we're yet to see an
exodus of Ubuntu users to openSUSE.

On a related note, a major thing Ubuntu and its derivatives have going for
them is the great font rendering out of the box. I wonder why other
distributions haven't yet adopted it, or the Infinality patches [3], as
defaults.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaST)

[2] That said, although I've been following their releases lately I haven't
used a SUSE distribution as a daily driver since SUSE 9.3, so I don't know how
the quality compares; any openSUSE users here that can chime in with a
comment?

[3] See [http://www.infinality.net/blog/](http://www.infinality.net/blog/).

~~~
antonios
> On a related note, a major thing Ubuntu and its derivatives have going for
> them is the great font rendering out of the box.

This. The default freetype rendering is horrible to my eyes, even worse than
Microsoft's SmearType(TM).

> I wonder why other distributions haven't yet adopted it, or the Infinality
> patches, by default.

Patents, I guess. Quoting Wikipedia:

> Microsoft has several patents in the United States on subpixel rendering
> technology for text rendering on RGB Stripe layouts. This had caused
> FreeType, the library used by most current software on the X Window System,
> to disable this functionality by default. Apple was able to use it in Mac OS
> X due to a patent cross-licensing agreement.

I do not know if Canonical has reached a similar agreement with Microsoft like
Apple. Perhaps someone from the Ubuntu camp can enlighten us.

~~~
mayhew
Pretty sure the Microsoft subpixel rendering patents are only applicable in
the United States.

------
onosendai
I also moved away from Unity after about a year or so of using it (some good
ideas, but too unstable for my taste), and instead of going Debian, which was
my initial impulse, I decided to give Ubuntu Gnome a try. This is a Ubuntu
variant that isn't talked about much, and it's still early days for them, but
it shows some promise.

You basically get the same Ubuntu base you're used to with all the
repositories and PPAs intact, which if we're being honest are probably second
to none in the whole Linux landscape, with a pretty vanilla GNOME 3 stack.

The devs just put out a call for more contributors today
([http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-
contributors](http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-contributors)), and
I'd love to see this distro take off. I'm also interested in seeing how
they'll handle the whole Mir situation.

~~~
bofussing
The Ubuntu Gnome spin looks very promising with the combination of the Ubuntu
ecosystem and the Gnome desktop environment.

the only fly in the ointment (for me at least) is the distros uncertain future
as Canonical developers are not keen on moving to the latest version of Gnome
([http://www.webupd8.org/2013/10/ubuntu-1404-lts-to-stay-on-
gt...](http://www.webupd8.org/2013/10/ubuntu-1404-lts-to-stay-on-
gtkgnome-38.html)) and longer term the focus will be on QT and other
technologies as Unity and Mir mature.

------
cgag
I left Ubuntu just because I don't trust them (issues 2 and 3), but I don't
understand why people make a big deal about the default DE. I switched to Mint
because I know everything "just works" with my laptop on it, and just changed
the DE to i3. I previously used i3 on Ubuntu with no problem, I can't imagine
it'd be too hard to use xfce or whatever else you wanted on Ubuntu.

------
dysoco
I consider myself a power-user, I have used a myriad of operating systems,
from Slackware to Gentoo, OpenBSD or Plan9.

Yet I like Ubuntu, the desktop works just fine (Believe it or not, I find
Unity a nice DE) I can find practically any application in it's repositories
(Or by PPA/Deb) and I can install an LTS and forget about upgrading for years.

Is there anything wrong with this? I find the new Dash Amazon search stupid
but it's one click away of being disabled, and I'm not happy with Mark's
opinions but that doesn't affect directly my experience with the OS.

So I don't see what the big fuss is about, many people say Ubuntu is not Linux
anymore, and I agree in some sense; but I like what Canonical is doing with
Ubuntu.

So until I find another distro that suits me, I will stay with Ubuntu, that
doesn't mean I don't love Gentoo or Arch anymore, but lately I need to get
work done, and my parents are using this PC therefore it needs to be available
24/7 without any kind of breakage.

------
sergiosgc
I've also switched to Debian, back in August. I don't like Unity, but the
deciding factor was the rolling update characteristic of Debian Testing.
Ubuntu just plain breaks in every semi-annual update, and I missed the rolling
aspect of Gentoo (which I used before Ubuntu).

Debian testing is reasonably up to date, updates continuously and requires
much less maintenance than Gentoo. It's about as hassle-free as Ubuntu. Ubuntu
does have some useful PPAs, but if you pick the right version, you can just
add an Ubuntu PPA to Debian and it will work.

I could live without some of the political aspects of Debian (there's no
Firefox in the default repos???), but they are really just minor hassles.
Import a couple PPAs, and you are rolling.

For those of you looking for an alternate distro, my shortlist was Debian
Testing and Arch Linux. Arch does look like it has a killer community: techie
and helpful, lots of available documentation, much like what I remember from
Gentoo. Debian won because I'm less inclined to workstation tweaking and more
inclined to real work nowadays.

~~~
uggedal
The problem with Debian Testing is the relatively long freeze periods before a
release. Wheezy was frozen for over 10 months.

------
csense
It would be much more informative to hear from people who use Debian for
things that require 3D acceleration -- Minecraft, running Windows games under
Wine, Blender.

I have a laptop with nVidia Optimus, so I use Bumblebee. Ah, I see this is in
the Debian repos [1] -- maybe I should give Debian a try!

[1] [https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee](https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee)

------
Artemis2
CrunchBang is a very nice OS too:
[http://crunchbang.net/](http://crunchbang.net/) (based on Debian)

~~~
mintplant
OpenBox + tint2 (the default in CrunchBang) with pytyle2 (tiling support for
non-tiling window managers) make for a very nice combination.

------
keypusher
There are actually many good Linux distributions not named Ubuntu.

~~~
sillysaurus2
Would anyone recommend some?

Also, would anyone talk about FreeBSD vs Linux? What are some reasons to
choose each?

~~~
nawitus
Arch Linux is great if you like 'hacking'.

~~~
papaf
I recently changed a machine to Arch after a failed Ubuntu 13.10 upgrade. Its
very strange. I was able to build a cross compiler following clear
instructions:

[http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/distcc-cross-
compiling](http://archlinuxarm.org/developers/distcc-cross-compiling)

But I cannot turn off the screensaver...

~~~
meddlepal
Arch is great, but you can get yourself into a world of hurt if you do not
remember to do a system update every couple of days. I've b0rked a couple of
Arch installs this way and fixing them is an hour or two of frustration
usually.

------
coffeeaddicted
I have both installed for a few years now (Debian on Desktop and Server,
Ubuntu on Laptop). First of all every article mentioning something like "I
switched recently and everything is fine" just gives me a little sad smile.
Yes - every Distro after a fresh install will usually work pretty well by now.
Problems tend to show after using it daily for a few months.

My experience is that new Ubuntu versions tend to mess up things often, but I
also notice that stuff gets fixed rather often within days. And otherwise one
can find lots of workarounds and help thanks to a large and active community.
That includes a workaround to disable the internet search for everything in
the dash for example.

Debian is fantastic on the server and updates just worked there for me so far.
On the Desktop on the other hand the situation is a lot more problematic. Old
desktop software is generally just worse than newer one. And software on
Debian tends to be outdated so much that I run constantly into old bugs which
are solved often for months or even years in current application versions, but
not yet in Debian. Pretty much every Desktop application where you want newer
versions is simply not available. And applications generally won't get updated
between release cycles because that's just not what stable does (except for
security fixes). Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites
tends to be a constant pain. So you start trying to work with backports,
custom compiled versions, installing packages build for Ubuntu and whatever
you can do to get applications you need running - which can cause more and
more problems in your system and you will get less and less help from the
Debian community because those are (understandably) not "their" packages.

When you bring up those problems the community often recommends using
"testing" or "unstable" and while those generally have newer apps they are
still mostly outdated. Also while most updates on testing and unstable work
most of the time they did mess up my system once in a while on updates so
badly that I tended to only update on weekends after a while to have enough
time to fix my system before I had to work with it again for the week (which
is why I switched to only using stable now for the last 3 versions, maybe
unstable/testing have gotten better since then, I can't tell about that).

I still love Debian for it's policy and community. And because I can fix
problems often myself (or with the help of the community) and hope that my
feedback is useful once in a while and will improve it in the long term I
still continue to use it despite the pain. But unfortunately I can't recommend
any Debian version right now for the Desktop for people without good Unix
knowledge unless they work only with a very restricted set of desktop
applications (so might be fine for company desktops where users are not
allowed to install anything anyway).

~~~
subsection1h

      > Pretty much every Desktop application where you want
      > newer versions is simply not available.
    

I'll never understand why this argument is made so frequently. The only
explanation I can think of is that I use entirely different apps than most
people do.

I use Debian Stable on my desktop computer, and I have the latest, or nearly
the latest, versions of the apps that I use most. I use backports, third-party
repos, and binaries that I download directly from upstream. For example, I get
the following apps from the sources listed below:

Firefox -
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/)

Google Chome -
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linux)

Thunderbird -
[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/latest/)

Emacs - [http://emacs.naquadah.org/](http://emacs.naquadah.org/)

LibreOffice - [http://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/libreoffice-
kde](http://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/libreoffice-kde)

VirtualBox -
[https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads)

PostgreSQL -
[http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/](http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/)

    
    
      > Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends
      > to be a constant pain.
    

Huh?

[http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/)

[http://mozilla.debian.net/](http://mozilla.debian.net/)

[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linux)

[http://packages.debian.org/chromium](http://packages.debian.org/chromium)

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Things change all the time. Last time I searched (shortly after wheezy release
when I first needed a newer Firefox and Iceweasel was not yet in backports) I
couldn't find a current Firefox version build which worked on 64-bit Linux. So
yeah - your link is one I haven't seen back then (not checking every week...)
so I installed the nightly build instead which was recommended to me. Which
worked for a while - until I think maybe 2 weeks ago when it first had some
troubles on screen-updates, which got fixed one release later, but that fix-
release broke flash (I stopped counting how often flash broke after an update
by now, yeah, we all hate it, but still...). But thanks for the link, I will
give that release you posted a shot next weekend - maybe I get a working
browser back then for a while. Note - you can get stuff working again always
in some way, but over the years I had to do that for a working browser over
and over and over again every few months!

And well, I mentioned backports and binaries and compiling stuff yourself etc.
But that has it's own share of troubles. Problems I had with backports for
example had been package conflicts and missing source dependencies, which
means hunting problems in there sometimes already fails in the "get shit
compiling" stage. Then certainly not all apps are in there. A quick check for
the apps I use often showed: Pidgin and xchat are in there (but both 1 version
behind, which means several months...) while clang, Filezilla, MyPaint, Pencil
and Audacity for example are not. A quick comparison on my Laptop showed that
for all of those except Pencil (which seems outdated on both systems) newer
versions are available at the moment in Ubuntu - in around half the time even
the most current version. Also one gets a simple installer with the newest
version for each of those (except clang) on Windows (just somewhat sad to see
how it is often easier to run free software tools on Windows).

And this is still pretty much at start of this release cycle, experience tells
me that it tends to get worse until the end.

------
louwrentius
For me there is a more mundane reason why I think about switching my servers
over from Ubuntu to Debian.

"Graphics"

That's right. It seems that Ubutu even on servers starts some high-res console
or does other stuff that causes a black screen during boot. It requires
fiddling with alt-fx keys to get a console. I never had such issues with
Debian. I switched away from Debian because so many software was out-dated and
an installation has max 3 years of support (Love the Ubuntu LTS versions),
which I care about because I don't have a fully-automated server/service
deployment environment using Ansible or something and manual reinstalling a
server is a chore, especially if it's not really necessary.

~~~
networked
>It seems that Ubutu even on servers starts some high-res console or does
other stuff that causes a black screen during boot. It requires fiddling with
alt-fx keys to get a console.

That sounds like it might be a side effect of kernel mode setting and/or
splash screens. You can try to disable both by changing

    
    
        GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash <possibly some other things>" 
    

to

    
    
        GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset <possibly some other things>"
    

in /etc/default/grub and see if it still happens.

Edit: I'm assuming you're using Ubuntu Server or Minimal CD.

~~~
louwrentius
Yes thanks, I recall this works, but I don't like the mindset of having this
stuff on a server-edition of your OS to begin with.

------
nzp
I recently switched to Ubuntu from FreeBSD because of driver support problems
(i.e. not willingly) and here's my take:

* Unity: I don't see what the big deal is. Granted, it's a subjective thing. As someone who generally dislikes DEs and would normally use just a tiling window manager maybe I don't appreciate the finer points in DE wars. I've been reluctant to install Xmonad because of the fear of what might break, and I have to say I've had no particular annoyances with Unity which I wouldn't have with any other desktop environment. Indeed, all the annoying stuff actually comes from GNOME components that they left. I find the Dash and HUD quite nice.

* Online scopes and advertising. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that a free (as in beer) general population friendly OS just isn't going to happen. The work needed to polish things to compete with Windows and OS X in this aspect is extremely boring. No hacker (or even average programmer) is going to spend his free time doing that. You have to be paid to do it. The money has to come from somewhere, thus advertising. I'm not a big fan this, but what Canonical is doing is at the moment our best shot of having a viable desktop OS which just works and lets you get on with your life (and even Ubuntu isn't there yet). And you can disable it with a single switch. Big deal.

* Shuttleworth trolling people... Well, it's certainly legitimate to not want to use an OS developed by a company owned by a person who says controversial stuff, but I don't see the technical angle. For example, is OS X better of worse because Jobs was a strange type? And as for Mir (that's what the issue revolves around), if Mir is a bad idea Wayland is also a bad idea. You just can't think Wayland is all peachy and Mir a horrible thing because they both basically do _the same_ thing. All the talk about splitting the community (what community would that be?) makes no sense -- if Canonical decided they need complete control of their graphics stack it's a legitimate decision, and no one has any moral ground to attack that decision. In developing Mir they are not interfering with Wayland in any way, they are simply not participating. (BTW, I don't think either Wayland or Mir are good ideas, we'll end up with the situation we have in OS X, where X can be tacked on when necessary, and it is often necessary, with who knows what kind of crappy support.)

I'm no fan of Shuttleworth or Ubuntu, I really just don't care about either on
any emotional level, but I'd like a FOSS OS which is also free as in beer AND
just works on the desktop and lets me get on with my work and life. After you
get to a certain age in life, fiddling with the OS gets old real fast.

------
ishbits
I'd like to see CentOS, but with the desktop environment stuff kept more up to
date.. Would give you solid underpinnings that lasts for years, then a modern
UI on top (Gnome 3, KDE what have you, Chrome, Firefox).. I know its mostly
doable, and did use a CentOS 6 desktop until a while ago, but ran into some
issues with modern desktop apps.

------
pantalaimon
But what if I'm tired of Debian's bad decisions like libav, wodim or trying to
replace OpenSSL with gnutls?

~~~
VLM
Usually update-alternatives takes care of it.

[https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives)

------
deckiedan
I also had an experience of installing debian recently, and finding it 'just
work' extremely well.

Especially if you have a set up (window-manager, etc) that you like and aren't
searching for a new cool updated-by-other-people UI (like windows, OSX, KDE,
Gnome and Unity), then debian is really quite easy to set up.

------
vivab0rg
Any elementaryOS love around here?

~~~
grigio
+1 I love ElementaryOS, specially the Gala Window Manager. It is so fast and
full-featured compared to Unity or Gnome3 Shell
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shXSV-9PJaU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shXSV-9PJaU)

~~~
swah
I tried opening multiple terminals/tabs, holding the shortcut... was
disappointed. To me it seems like Linux graphics never feel "good" like
Windows'.

------
pja
I have hopes for the Tanglu project delivering on the promise of rolling
releases based on Debian Testing for desktop use. But they aren't quite there
yet unfortunately.

[http://www.tanglu.org/](http://www.tanglu.org/)

------
qznc
I tried Fedora (Korora spin) for a few months. However, battery life was bad
and Chrome got buggy. Back to Ubuntu LTS (with Gnome 2) for now.

Will probably try Debian stable + lots of backports next.

------
mtct
[https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD)

and the points 1 and 2 are out

------
Axsuul
Ubuntu provides LTS versions. Does any other distro do this? I'm mainly using
it for my server OS and I'm always interested in alternatives.

~~~
jomohke
Debian stable releases come out roughly every two years, and are supported for
an extra year (or so) after the following release.

Otherwise RHEL/CentOS have longer support periods (ten years).

------
shapeshed
Choose Arch. Pick any desktop environment and learn how easy it is to switch
if you don't like Unity/Gnome/etc

------
sgtnasty
I have been pretty happy with Xubuntu, I get all the Ubuntu benefits without
the Unity or GNOME 3 mess.

~~~
swah
But you don't get all the benefits :( For example, Xubuntu (IIRC) won't even
have a Wifi widget for setting up your network. If you mount a pendrive, how
do you access? You have to open a a file explorer or you won't see it... etc.

------
jsmcgd
I never clicked with Unity so I tried Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Don't regret
it one bit.

------
antman
Linux Mint LMDE with MATE.

------
LaSombra
There's always Fedora, CentOS and OpenSuSE...

------
general_failure
I recommend mint.

I think its a good idea to try out alternatives.

~~~
josteink
But if the idea is to get away from Canonical's decisions, moving to a distro
based directly on Ubuntu seems a bit backwards.

Check the repos. Mint is Ubuntu + some extras.

~~~
devx
They also have a Debian version now:

[http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php](http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php)

------
jbeja
I will try Opensuse instead Debian.

------
grigio
is possible to install Gala WM / ElementaryOS on top of Debian?

