I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.
Word. Debian is great! In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.
Word. Debian is great! In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.
Canonical showed up to the party with a substantial concerted and sustained effort of funding/developers to take the existing Debian framework and make it more user-friendly.
In particular, Ubuntu was willing to package substantially non-free software into the experience. Things like Flash just worked most of the time. There was a substantial emphasis on usability, so that Linux-on-the-desktop could reach people with less background knowledge (everyone was doing this, of course, but Ubuntu seemed to put less emphasis on other things).
When Ubuntu emerged, Debian users were concerned that Ubuntu would take over the DFSG-software world and make it, in the long run, less free. What turned out to happen, in this case, was that the approachability of Ubuntu, built atop the Debian foundation, drew many more users away from RedHat/Fedora and ultimately strengthened the Debian/Ubuntu userbase and ecosystem. The usability really mattered -- I've repaired the occasional Debian system with Ubuntu boot-disks simply because the drivers, at the time, worked better.
Thanks to the intrinsic properties of open-source development, many of the good things about Ubuntu have found their way into Debian (and GNU/Linux at large). The Debian of today is a much more-readily usable experience than the Debian of 2004 thanks to the work of a great many people.
As someone (still) using Ubuntu today, I have 1 simple answer: OOB experience.
Back in the days, I could insert a Ubuntu live-CD (remember CDs?), and have a fully working system, including proprietary graphics-driver and wifi-firmware. And installing from that Live-CD gave me the same experience once installed.
Basically, it was a machine 100% ready to use, with everything autodetected, with absolutely zero manual effort.
Debian otoh required me to hook up a wired network connection (because those had free drivers), and then manually track down which packages contained the proprietary drivers and firmware I needed.
That single thing made a world of difference to me back then, and it still does today.
I would rather attribute it to advertising, and probably some contracts with the right people. Canonical did a lot of advertising in the past years, and contracts can mean a school mandates the installation of Ubuntu, which translates in hundreds of students becoming accustomed to it, together with some of their parents and friends, and so on. This is something completely out of the reach for a community supported distribution like Debian; attempting to change it would mean putting a corporation behind it, which would be a recipe for destruction of its principles.
Debian is great. I particularly respect Debian as an organization. On my home laptop, I've used Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc etc.
But on my work computer, I've always used Ubuntu (or sometimes MacOS), because:
- I prefer Ubuntu LTS to Debian's testing/stable approach.
- Lots of other devs use Ubuntu, so instructions are often focused on the distro
- It's always had all the drivers I need packaged with the distro
- Smaller projects are more likely to set up a PPA than host their own package repository.
May I ask why?
I realize I could do something similar with Debian, but testing isn't generally stable enough for the use cases I have in mind, whereas stable gets stuck with some very old packages. If I need a new package toward the end of the lifespan of a LTS, I can often find PPA. If not, I'll just compile it myself.
It's just my preference. To be honest, probably a big part is that Ubuntu is mostly what I've used the past decade.
Personally, I shifted to Ubuntu since it removed headaches re: getting a system running out of the box. By the time i shifted in ~2011 I had already transitioned through SLS -> Slackware -> RedHat -> Debian over the 1993-2011 period. After 18 years, Ubuntu brought relief in that I didn't have to deal with fiddling with things to get a system up and running. At that point the fun-factor of fiddling with the system had worn off and I was mostly concerned with getting work done, which Ubuntu addressed. Last time I tried Debian (~4 years ago?), it felt like it had caught up in terms of the out-of-the-box experience, which was nice.
Because I don't have a wired internet connection, and my wifi adapter requires proprietary drivers. If I could just download and install from an ISO like I can with Ubuntu, I'd switch to Debian in a heartbeat, but I don't feel like having to do manual workarounds just to get a running Linux distro.
And there lies the problem.
The Ubuntu way is to suggest installing non-free drivers from the same reputable source as the rest of the distro: by clicking your assent right there in the installer.
Debian's download page makes it hard to find the images with the non-free bits. They're there, though, if you dig just a bit.
Then, on laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics hardware, for some reason the installers insist on loading both the i915 and nouveau kernel modules, which then fight over the console. (I asked over at the nouveau IRC, and they said a one-liner patch would fix that, still after all these years.) So, you add "nouveau.modeset=0" to the boot line on those laptops.
Finally, there is the confusion over the name "unstable", which is what people using Debian run, at least for the parts that need to be up to date, like browsers, media players (mpv), and firmware.
But the experience once you have got set up is better than on Ubuntu.
This was after several years of running Redhat, Suse and Debian on desktops, so I wasn’t a newbie.
for me personally easier to use installer, proprietary driver/codec support out of the box, faster release cycle, debian stable is too old for me and unstable can break at at all times/doesn't receive any major updates before new releases and so on. Also Ubuntu for the longest time used to be the only distro shipping with good font rendering settings, staring at code all day this actually was fairly important to me
so basically Ubuntu 'just works', if I ran Debian I'd just replicate Ubuntu's default settings pretty much anyway so I can just save myself the few hours.
Sid has been quite stable for me, the packages are much newer than Ubuntu (generally on par with Arch or close to it) and the few noteworthy bugs I have seen over the years have been reported and handled within 24 to 48hrs of said package being updated with the problematic code.
But they do a lot of marketing.
My impression is that Ubuntu always respected Debian and always encouraged all fixes to happen upsteeam, for example for new packages you can see that Ubuntu is asking people to submit them to Debian (so everyone benefits) https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages#NEW_pa...