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One distro to rule them all.

I have not met one person who disagrees with the fact that Debian Stable is stable. Outdated sometimes, but never unstable.

Always outdated, I'd say.

Psst - you can use an 'unstable' branch and always be up to date. And I think there are ones that are actually unstable, too, if you like to live on the edge.


I know I ought to use Debian - have before, and it was great - but there was a repository problem last time I did a clean install so I went with Ubuntu. Figure I'll give it another try when 8.04 comes out.

What "unstable" means recently is that a lot of the packages in the unstable tree have dependency problems. This means that building a complete system from scratch using the unstable tree using 'debootstrap' is possible some days and not possible other days. Usually, a minimal CLI system (100M-150M) can be built almost every day, but a complete X Windows system will often have some packages fail to install, particularly Gnome or KDE. Sometimes the packages can be 'forced' to install by using dpkg to install a prerequisite package and then 'apt get install -f' to "fix" the installation, this occurs when the package maintainers have not properly listed the dependencies for a package well enough for 'apt-get' to do its job, and the maintainers only tested the ability to upgrade from a "release" system and not from a "from scratch" debootstrap system.

For example, currently an IceWM unstable system built using all the latest X.org components will hang on hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL, because IceWM does not work properly with all the other updated X.org packages.

The only way to get the latest X.org components to even be able to test them is adding them to a debootstrap-ed system ("apt-get install xorg"), since upgrading an older install (even of unstable) complains of "broken packages" and has for almost one year now.

With all this said, I have always run an "unstable" system for years now, updated daily, and the value of things with fixes/enhancements far exceeds the very occasional breakage. I did learn when upgrading a critical application, to first try an apt-get upgrade on an unimportant test machine.

I know I ought to use Debian - have before, and it was great - but there was a repository problem last time I did a clean install so I went with Ubuntu. Figure I'll give it another try when 8.04 comes out.

This makes absolutely no sense.
A Debian 'repository problem' made you switch to Ubuntu, but now you might want to go back to Debian once the new Ubuntu (8.04) comes out?

I'm no Debian expert, but I think Debian sticks to version numbers (like for instance Red Hat does) which makes it indeed stable as in "predictable", but then Red Hat does more backporting of packages from newer releases, often to increase its stability.

And sticking with older versions is actually something that I think makes Debian unstable sometimes. A recent example I stumbled upon, was a problem in the OpenISCI initiator: it didn't take me long before I found some bugs that were already solved. Another advantage of the more active backporting that Red Hat does, is that you get to benefit from some new features (like with Xen, being able to run 64-bit next to 32-bit: I'm afraid we'll have to wait for that with Debian for the next stable release? And cyrus 2.3 was released I think just before the freeze of etch, but it still has 2.2 and it seems like it will stay like that. Although during sarge I believe there was an major upgrade from mysql that I was surprised about, that was actually an example where Debian didn't stick to older versions - which is good, but also problematic in this case.
We've had serious problems with kernel images in the past too, problems with (too new) hardware that just were not solved in Debians stock kernels...)

Oh well, that said: I like Debian, I just wished it had the release cycle and freshness/packaging policy of other distributions sometimes. But it serves us really well, for some machines we pick Debian, others get Red Hat (or FreeBSD, or, or...)

Stable, Testing and Unstable means different things to Debian than other distros.

Stable: It's literally stable. Version numbers don't bump, security patches only. Great for servers and production environments. It's constantly cooked for security && stability and this cooking pays of as we see.

Testing: Your $fav_distro release is Debian testing. Version numbers bump slowly but solid and dependable with no killing security holes. Hundred days of uptime. Sometimes it's a bit outdated (a week or so) but stability pays it off. Great for non-critical / casual desktop.

Unstable: Cutting edge, massively updated but not secure as testing (not to mention stable). Has big security holes sometimes. Great for grabbing latest amarok or kernel if the current one doesn't support a thing or two, nothing more. If you are just curious, update to unstable once in every three months then wait for testing to catch up (catches in ~1 month) if your system is secured using external security mechanisms (firewalls and such).

...and don't forget: debian is not an OOB thing. You make debian what it is. Like Slack, Gentoo or Arch. (I've installed mine as etch beta-1 and it's now lenny. I've cloned it to my office PC instead of installing a fresh one and it's working flawlessly at home and office.)

Also please remember that debian is just a distro which placed itself to the higher, geeker side of the spectrum. They've made their choices and they're very good at them. I beleive that Debian vs. (*buntu, suse, mandriva, etc) comparisons are a bit apples to oranges since the secondary part has different goals than Debian-like ones (geek, technical vs. mainstream, easy to use).

I'd like to argue that stability point. Tell me, why does Redhat release a Enterprise version (rather than Fedora, which is bleeding edge and aimed at the average desktop user?).

My experiences with Debian (vs. other distributions) are that it is more stable. Sure, you might get a bug or a security issue with an 'old', read: stable, package, big deal. It's usually bug fixed very quickly and backported to Debian stable and you can get it via an apt-get update/upgrade.

As to testing/unstable branches (or experimental for that matter), they are also pretty damn stable from my experiences. When I ran Debian, I ran a mostly stable base, with some testing, unstable and even experimental packages. I rarely had issues, and if they were, they usually were simply package compatibility issues, which is to be expected in all honesty.

All these people bashing Debian because it's "too old" get a grip! If you don't like Debian, or its policy (ie. re: iceweasal) then don't use it! Debian won't miss you. For those of us who like Debian because it's dead stable, and it has policies that respect open source and FSF ideals. Many distributions don't respect the FSF these days.

Oh, and go and take the first Ubuntu release from a few years ago, and try and update it to each subsequent release - see how it breaks. Many old users of Debian successfully update to each new stable release without an issue. That's the difference between Debian and other 'debian based' distributions and real stability.

Dave

I've installed mine as etch beta-1 and it's now lenny. I've cloned it to my office PC instead of installing a fresh one and it's working flawlessly at home and office.

I really like that about Debian. I've done similar stuff. My install started out as Woody, and is now Lenny, many years on. It's moved from one partition to another, one drive to another, and to a completely different machine in the meantime, as well as being cloned to an office machine sort of like you did.

It's gone from kernel 2.4 to 2.6, Xfree86 to Xorg, supermount to hal/udev/pmount, bootsplash to splashy, OSS to ALSA, GCC 2.95 to GCC 4.2 and so on.

I think it's pretty neat I haven't had to do a clean install in something over four years now. It's done great surviving new hardware, and several upgrades - and by this point it is thouroughly mine. The only thing likely to necessitate a new install at this point is a move to 64 bit.

MamiyaOtaru wrote: "My install started out as Woody, and is now Lenny, ... I think it's pretty neat I haven't [ever] had to do a clean install".

A Debian system that started out as Woody and has been upgraded that many times is NOT the same as one installed cleanly from scratch, for example, using debootstrap and then adding packages (apt-get install xorg, apt-get install kde, ...). Actually, the time package maintainers need to spend on the endless permutations of upgrading from whatever ancient version of the packages you started from (why not pre-Woody, i.e. Potato?), is a total waste in my view. And they DO waste time on this, because sometimes you can upgrade an old system to the latest packages but not a newer system. Learning to do a clean, fresh install is actually pretty simple: mkdir mybootstrap, debootstrap http://my_mirror/debian ./mybootstrap, edit/add a few config files like /etc/fstab, add a kernel (I use kernel.org kernels so I can have one from a few weeks ago, not months or years ago, which is good if you are purchasing brand new hardware and want most/all the stuff to work), and you have a fresh current, supported install, not a series of 10,000 upgrades from an ancient install. Now you can tar up the clean install and blast it out to a million machines.