Debian User Forums

bw123 wrote:

MagiChimp wrote: George W. Bush., once said: "Either you are with us, or against us."

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm

Thanks to W. we have bushisms.

I use it as a host/server for my stuff. Well, actually I find Debian more advanced than the other distributions of Linux, I don't know why but things seem to be smoother and faster with Debian. Or maybe it's just my specs? haha

I was using ubuntu for many years, and I am still using ubuntu on my laptop. I also have a computer which runs on ubuntu, but just this year I switched it to debian. The reason being ubuntu seems to be getting too commercialised. The initial versions of ubuntu are fun to play with, easily customisable etc. It used to emphasise on user-friendliness and is one of the many OS that serves as a "spokesperson" for Linux.

But the current version installs the company's products (ubuntuone, search function which sends your queries to amazon etc) and leaves a lot of things out, which makes it less user friendly. I have to agree one thing over Debian is that Ubuntu's drivers works out of the box, and Debian takes a long time to release a new version, which was holding me back from switching.

So this year, I was still hestiating about installing Debian on my home computer but hey, if ubuntu works, why shouldn't debian? After all, ubuntu is built on Debian, so I decided to give it a try. I have a USB wireless adapter which was not recognised by Debian. I did some research and found the driver that I want, and everything went through smoothly after that.

When I finally get to use debian with the internet up and running, I was so impressed by its speed. There are not many processes running in the background, and each process are easily recognisable. In contrast, ubuntu has a lot of processes running at the same time that sometimes I wonder if one of them is a virus or not. Some of these processes have weird names, which explains my suspicions.

I wouldn't mind switching my laptop to Debian, but I think I will leave ubuntu running till the support for this release is over (which is in 3 years I guess). Then I will decide after that whether to switch.

enoughsaid05 wrote:Debian takes a long time to release a new version, which was holding me back from switching.

Yes, but that's a good thing. No updates or upgrades to break your installation. Can't argue about working out of the box, though. I had some minor hassles with wheezy. I had to to install the time daemon, for example. A server doesn't get the time from the web but c'mon, guys.

A slow/long release cycle is a boon for system stability and reducing maintenance overhead. It always takes me a while to get comfortable with a newly installed or upgraded OS. Debian has a major release roughly every 2 years.

Ubuntu and Mint is every 6 months, which means more effort for the user in "settling in", more breakage, more potential for bugs sneaking through the review process or plain regressions, more new features and such that needs your attention to understand (or just get rid of), and so on. Of course, the contained packages/software is more up to date...

Once again, its about your needs as a user. I've started preferring stability and reliability more than been on the cutting edge, perhaps I'm getting old...

Because it "just works". Its fast, stable, has may packages available instead of me having to compile them, good reputation, has a bad ass logo.

Ill sound like a broken record here compared to the earlier posters, but yes, because it "just works". Stable as a rock (mostly), has a good provision of packages and software for work tasks, and because of its appealing project philosophy.

It's an excellent base for ones IT life.

Because I like apt-get.

- social contract
- reliability
- respects it's users
- practical
- the swirl is cool

I used Ubuntu first but I was always dissapointed with dist-upgrade. Couldn't get VPN to work (which I need to connect to a remote network twice a week) and when I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 I was really disappointed to find a huge number of irritating bugs that destroyed the whole user experience.

Hi. I posted this just over a week ago: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ost5090931

I use Debian Wheezy (with a Cinnamon desktop) for its stability. I don't need the latest, but I do need something I can rely upon. The forums and community provide usually clear technical guides. All the software I need is available for the OS, and most of the software I would try, as well.

I also multiboot into Win7, XP, Fedora 20, Mint 16, and #!. I try multiple distros to see what fits my simple needs best. Distro hopping is something I've been doing for years, looking for "the one". Now, I think I've found it.

because it offers a huge collection of building blocks and supports them all

I've been using Linux for about a month now. Started out with Mint, moved to Ubuntu, then Debian. The reason I kept switching is that I was annoyed with the silly bugs. Now when I first installed Debian Stable it felt like a disappointment.. there seemed to be even more fixing to do than with the derivatives.

However, once I got things sorted out after a day or so (building on my previous experience of RTFM) and ditched XFCE for MATE, I realized that BASIC STUFF just worked that didn't in Ubuntu/Mint. Like ok boot times. Or Firefox. Or suspend. Or cpu-friendly sound.

I'll stick to Debian for a while.

Hi,

Because Debian hits the sweet spot right on. It niether considers me a complete noob or a linux rockstar.

Because the packages are stable yet not very old. Earlier I had to chose between linux OS flavours that were stable but had (and still have) old kernels, old packages. On the other side lies stuff thats all new and shiny but would break every now and then, or would be upgraded every six months or some other reason.

I get better battery life when I run on Debian (7.2 XFCE 64 Bit with Docky).

And that works for me real good.

I have been an Ubuntu user for years, then bounced back and forth from Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora. All are good systems, but I usually defaulted back to Ubuntu....that is until I just couldn't deal with Unity any more. I recently changed jobs and was given the option to work on Mac or Linux; I chose Linux and used Ubuntu as well. I had many issues on my workstation, constant popups from apropos, dependency issues and crashes ("unfortunately Ubuntu encountered an error....). I really grew tired of troubleshooting those problems and they often interfered with my actual duties. I checked out Debian because I read that it was stable and because I was already familiar with it to an extent thanks to Ubuntu. I'm glad I did! Really enjoying the system and troubleshooting issues is a breeze. I look forward to continuing my Linux learning in this community!

Mutual respect -- we trust each other.

It either gives me what I want, or gives me the means to get what I want. Better yet, it gives me what I need.

I feel welcome, at home. At peace, after years of wrestling with a hostile, heartless OS.

When I try a different distro, I keep accidentally typing apt-get out of habit. It gets old fast lol.

I use Debian because it's simple, rock solid stable, highly supported by a large community, and the available packages is by far the largest.

While Red Hat is the business standard in the Linux world, I consider Debian to be the Home Standard, and Valve single handedly assured that Debian will continue to be the standard for Linux home users for ages to come by choosing Debian.

Sent from my SM-N900T using Tapatalk

Of course because of all of the above, but also, to add a little levity . . .

because if you really want to, and with not too much effort, you can still get fun and maximally simple things like blast - even though no longer officially suported - to run on a spanking fancy new machine with essentially all the latest bells and whistles:



But I even liked it back in the day when it was hard to get a random gui screen display or printer to work - just because of the good principles behind the project. And the amazaing thing is that those principles have actually succeeded to get better for me in ways that the unprincipled software communnity has not. There are few things in life that seem to turn out that way, but as this is one such rarity, it's well worth celebrating!

]\[

chrissywissy wrote:Because it WORKS. I came to Linux by way of the (heavily-hyped) Ubuntu, and enjoyed it at first. It was faster than W7 on my desktop, and worked ok on my aged Toshy Sat Pro laptop. But there were the occasional hardware issues and instabilities. I don't mind a BIT of work to tweak the look or functionality, but on later Ubuntu(s) and its derivatives, mobile broadband was an insurmountable hurdle on the laptop, and speed on both machines had dropped (to almost the same as W7 on the desktop PC).

I finally tried Debian Squeeze (6.0.2) and it works well on both machines. The stock software and programmes meet virtually all my needs, although I have added Icedove. It's faster than Ubuntu with the standard desktop (LXDE loads to a usable state quicker, but doesn't seem any speedier in normal use). The only other bit of (slightly awkward) work has been installing flash and java for the browser.

I may not stay with Debian forever, and will probably try PC BSD 9 and the next Ubuntu LTS (on the desktop at least). BUT, I'm here for now.

Played around with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and PC BSD 9, and although both seemed ok at first, soon returned to Squeeze, and then Wheezy with XFCE on both my current machines (an old HP desktop and a newer laptop dual booting with Windows 7).