debian vs ubuntu

[Dan Ritter]

On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 06:58:09AM -0500, Scott R. Ehrlich wrote:
> I'd like to find out from Debian and Ubuntu users if Debian offers the 
> same upgrade options as Ubuntu?   Also, which distro seems to offer more 
> current versions of applications (Firefox, etc)?   Ubuntu seems to prefer 
> their hacked helper (ubufox) to make Firefox really happy.  Does Debian 
> keep that kind of control over their distro?

The differences between Debian and Ubuntu are policy-oriented.
Debian isn't so much a distribution as an organization which
produces a distro according to its guidelines. That means that
where other distros can make decisions based on pragmatism --
everyone wants Firefox, so we ship Firefox -- Debian has to make
decisions based on principles. (In this case, Mozilla has
trademarked the Firefox name and icons
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/ 
Debian's constitution requires that they not ship anything that
can't be legally modified by their users, so they have to build
their own version, rename it and use new icons.)

Ubuntu has a "we ship every six months" release policy. Debian
has a "we ship when there are no Release-Critical bugs left"
policy.

> I've also found Ubuntu strongly prefers their hacked version of video 
> drivers (such as NVidia) vs the manufacturer's-supplied ones.  How is 
> Debian in this arena?

Debian doesn't ship proprietary drivers, although they are
packaged and made available by non-Debian sources, such as
www.debian-multimedia.org.

> It has taken me almost 24 hours to upgrade Ubuntu - I am getting prompted 
> if I want to keep or replace certain apps or config files (samba, apache, 
> among others), and the installer cannot continue until I acknowledge.  I 
> would have thought the Ubuntu team would have made this completely 
> transparent and trivial by now.

You can make it trivial by invoking a package management tool
with a "blindly accept all changes" switch. For example, 

apt-get dist-upgrade -y

will do everything it can, and abort if it finds itself in a
dangerous position.

> Does Debian offer the same "Broken" option to help a user unbreak an 
> update that went bad?  Don't see updates go bad much these days (at least 
> for me), but they can still happen, and it is nice to know the OS can 
> handle much of it.

apt-get -f install will do what it can to fix a broken system.

> So how does Debian stack up vs Ubuntu for 32-bit desktop use these days?
> Keeping up on applications (latest and security patched, unbreaking of 
> updates, etc)?

Debian has a security team which is consistently on top of
things for the stable release. You don't get the latest versions
in a security update; you get fixed versions of what you have,
so that functionality doesn't change. In essence, every Debian
Stable release is what Ubuntu would call LTS -- long term
support. 

I'm writing this from my new desktop, on which I installed the
release-candidate for the next Debian stable version, Lenny, in
the AMD-64 architecture. Absolutely everything went smoothly.

-dsr-

-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.

You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.