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I wouldn't call it FUD. Ubuntu's terrible initial state as well as principles are completely valid reasons to drop allegiance to a free operating system. His reasoning and motivation are clear as day and it does not seem to me that he is trying to make any untrue, dubious, or over-reaching claims.

I of course, am sympathetic to his view point. Without having ever heard of this guy, I had the exact same experience while returning to Ubuntu after some time.

I really, really did not like how Ubuntu was initially packaged after a fresh install. Of course, I can make it into anything I want -- no use complaining! So I spent a few hours on this process, molding it into the operating system I wanted it to be. But then I started to think, why wasn't I doing this on Debian, or Arch, or FreeBSD? Since the moment I went to download Ubuntu, the web page was in my face to buy shit. I don't mind paying for software and I believe certain things have intrinsic value. But this approach to selling an operating system started needling a pit of dread into my stomach. If I'm already taking the time to undue everything I hate about the default Ubuntu install, and if I am already building up a healthy loathing at the way the operating system wants to sell my attention and information at every opportunity, how does it offer any value at all? Then the question occurred to me: What awful thing that I am going to have to undue is going to come out of the next release of Ubuntu?

For me Ubuntu has solidly become the wrong choice. I don't mind spending the time to customize my computing environment. But if I need to do that I'm going to choose an OS that aligns better with my principles.

> All of Debian is available in Ubuntu.

Less is more. If everything he needs is available in Debian and he doesn't need the extra stuff provided by Ubuntu, then the default choice should be to use Debian.

amen

Exactly. I'm not exactly a power user, but once I heard about Ubuntu being based on Debian, and the whole Linux being modular thing, along with learning how decoupled 'Linux' is from the GUI I quite literally made the switch to Debian cold-turkey. It doesn't have things I don't want, and Debian stable is relatively stable(understatement I know). For other purposes, I boot into Windows.

If you think that way, then you're reasoning about it wrong. Replace the words "doesn't need" with "probably won't need" and then you're asking the right question.

Last time I used Debian on an older Dell Inspiron, the wifi wasn't working and making it work meant I had to recompile the kernel. I also tried a Wifi stick and the same thing happened. The drivers weren't open-source and so I was out of luck on both Debian and OpenSuse.

Out of frustration I installed Ubuntu and in Ubuntu my Wifi just worked out of the box. And that's when I switched.

Of course, Ubuntu does make mistakes. Nouveau for instance is better for my old laptop's Geforce and yet Ubuntu still asks me to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, drivers which have brought me nothing but frustration. But regardless, Ubuntu does have the best hardware support.

Ubuntu is, for me, Debian plus an unending parade of annoyances slapped on top. Mistyped a command? Let's wait 5 seconds for the prompt to come back because Ubuntu is going to search the repositories for packages that may match "friefox". Want to use a window manager or login manager besides the defaults? Hope you like pain--the last time I tried that on Ubuntu, only the default window manager was configured to shut off the program that draws the little "loading" dots on the screen as you boot, meaning my new FVWM desktop had glowing dots marching across the center over and over. Oh, sorry, my bad, if I wanted to use a window manager that isn't Unity, I should have downloaded an entirely different fucking ISO because apparently the way Debian has done things for years isn't good enough.

But hey, at least the community is a cesspool of idiots cargo-culting their way to oblivion!

Edit: Ooh, almost forgot: http://i.imgur.com/2sCYFvh.png Ubuntu has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

search the repositories for packages that may match "friefox"

After having used Xubuntu for a while I'm getting really tempted to just ln -s /bin/grep /bin/grerp

:)

Edit: Ooh, almost forgot: http://i.imgur.com/2sCYFvh.png Ubuntu has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Would you prefer seeing a terminal login prompt after X crashed?

Um... I would? Then I can reattach to my tmux sessions, keep working, and restart at my leisure... or just restart x.

But I haven't used ubuntu in a while, so perhaps this is just a case of I'm not in the right user group for the distro.

Obviously x didn't crash, since the window appears in x. I get the same thing every time I start Ubuntu. When I ask for details, it's like "oh, I don't actually know what crashed, but I think something did."

I actually had to disable apport because of my relatively new hardware. When idle the GPU can enter a super low powered state which the Ubuntu driver interprets as a crash, then the GPU comes back online and... the crash reporter crashes. Resulting in about 20 'internal error' pop ups until it gives up.

> Edit: Ooh, almost forgot: http://i.imgur.com/2sCYFvh.png Ubuntu has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

You can disable this feature by opening /etc/default/apport and editing enabled=1 to enabled=0. Then stop the service with "sudo service apport stop" or reboot.

You can then selectively enable it again when you notice a reproducible bug or use ubuntu-bug to report bugs against packages.

> Let's wait 5 seconds for the prompt to come back because Ubuntu is going to search the repositories for packages that may match "friefox"

I actually like this feature. I'm often following a tutorial, or using a command on a newer install, and suddenly a command's not found -- it's really nice to be able to see how to get past the obstacle immediately without Googling, guessing, or trying to figure out how to make the "apt-cache search" command tell you what you want to know.

Also, for me the loading time isn't this long and is greatly reduced after the first such search. I'm guessing your system is under RAM pressure and your disk is fragmented.

I'm just sick of my OS trying to be smarter than me. It's usually not, it should just back off.

> Mistyped a command?

If you mistype commands often, there's an entertaining package which contains an "sl" command.

  sudo apt-get install sl

From the manpage:

  DESCRIPTION
         SL stands for Steam Locomotive.

  BUGS
         It rarely shows contents of current directory.

The only point I slightly disagree with you on is privacy - here's my reasoning: Some defaults are visible, you see them and think "that's annoying, I'd better figure out a way to change it". Invisible defaults like privacy settings can be a lot more insidious, especially when (for better or worse) you expect your OS to treat your information very privately.

Ubuntu seem to hide the privacy settings a little bit (even that link you sent, the privacy section isn't properly explained, just a vague reference to "files activity"). When I read your post about the central place to manage privacy settings I thought "wow really?" went there and changed them.

Now on the other hand, you might argue this is all my fault for not taking the time to find out about my privacy settings...

> Invisible defaults like privacy settings can be a lot more insidious, especially when (for better or worse) you expect your OS to treat your information very privately.

It is treated privately - it gets anonymized, so there's no privacy violation going on in the first place. There's a notice on the Dash that gives you the details, which is visible any time the search box is visible. And the box is a global search box. Do you expect privacy when you search in a Google search box also?

> Now on the other hand, you might argue this is all my fault for not taking the time to find out about my privacy settings...

No. My argument is that your privacy isn't violated with default settings in the first place. For the truly paranoid, you can still turn it off. But if you have that level of paranoia, you'd better audit all the source code on your system yourself. Do you know, for example, the details of how Chrome and Firefox anonymize URLs you visit for blacklist warning purposes?

> It is treated privately - it gets anonymized, so there's no privacy violation going on in the first place.

Fat chance. Say I wanted to edit my resume, so I pop open Dash and search for "John Smith Resume". As long as they send up "John Smith Resume", they know a) my name, and b) that I'm looking for a new job.

> Do you expect privacy when you search in a Google search box also?

Apples and oranges. I have different expectations when searching local data than when searching public data. If something's indexed by Google, it's not secret obviously. If something's on my hard drive, it might be secret.

> I have different expectations when searching local data than when searching public data.

Your problem is that you believe the Dash to be a search for local data, when it is not. It is a single search box which is supposed to figure out what resource you want (be it local or remote).

Observe ordinary users (the users that Ubuntu is aimed at, btw). Many will go to Google and type a URL in their search box. They do not distinguish. If a search fails, they don't care that they didn't type the search into the wrong type of box. As far as they're concerned, it didn't work. Demanding that they differentiate first is a worse UX.

If you want to do a local search, then don't type the search into a global search box.

Trust is an important factor in choosing software and justifiable so. Ubuntu is no longer trustworthy for a lot of people.

you hit the nail! they certainly dont act like people you can trust, their motto now is the same as apple! that they know best!

Exactly. I am using Ubuntu without Unity (Gnome3) or the Softwarecenter (aptitude) or Ubuntu One (wtf) for a while now.

I must admit i haven't touched Debian as a Desktop Operating System for many years but i appreciate the Desktop Experience that is available with Ubuntu out of the box very very much. All _my_ stuff just works (hello binary blob drivers at Debian?), most stuff nowadays has those private package archives, yet i still don't need to run debian unstable to get relatively recent software. I know i have 6 months until a new version comes along, as opposed to many years of waiting. I admit i frequently reinstall Ubuntu (like every 1 or 2 releases), but that's no hazzle while keeping /home. I still get to test btrfs (changed back to ext4 one release afterwards), i still can screw around with the system a little bit.. nahh.. i don't see me going back to Debian on the Desktop.. Ubuntu may be only a redesign of if, but they make it working nicely on my laptop, the community is huge..

I must admit i wouldn't want to sit down an afternoon with Debian to figure out why my graphics is screwed or my Wifi isn't working, etc. Not anymore, it was fine 10 years ago, ,not 2013..

That said, i'd choose Debian as a server OS any time!

Ditto everything. I also use gnome-do launcher and vim keybindings for everything, making my UI 95% keyboard driven and whatever the window manager is irrevelant. Unity? Gnome3? Mate? Etc. Couldn't care less, all the same to me.

>private package archives

Personal Package Archives [1] actually, but another good point. Between the Debian and Ubuntu repos, Ubuntu PPAs, and the awesome Debian tool Update Alternatives [2], I can install any piece of software, packaged or not, and even multiple versions simultaneously and change the active version with a single command line command [3]. I don't know if the Red Hat or Open Suse ecosystem has something like this, but I'd have a hard time switching to something else without an equivalent.

[1]: https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA

[2]: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-customizing....

[3]: https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/h...

When was the last time you tried Debian on your desktop? It's much better than it used to be. The only piece of hardware that didn't work out of the box for me was wifi, but I just had to enable the nonfree repo to install my wifi driver. Other than that, it's a lot like Ubuntu.

Long time ago, i switched to Ubuntu when it arrived. Besides drivers, i still wouldn't want to fiddle around with unstable repos, apt pinning and those long release cycles on my desktop. Nowadays you get PPAs for most stuff you need, that's nice, too. So there is still some additional value that Ubuntu provides. If not that then the arguably larger "Desktop community". Launchpad is a nice-to-have platform as well, in my opinion.

> All of Debian is available in Ubuntu

Except two things: higher standards around packaging/stability and the DFSG. These are the things I value most in Debian, especially the way they stick to their guns and refuse to release until it's ready.

Again, can't you get these same packages on Ubuntu?

No. They're similar because Ubuntu forks (mostly) from debian's unstable branch. After that point they diverge on both points the parent poster mentions.

In addition to the things others have pointed out, Debian offers two things over Ubuntu: you can choose to be very stable with a fairly strong guarantee that software won't crash, or be much closer to the cutting-edge with sooner updates and rolling releases.

People who like Gnome2 might want to try MATE, Mint's fork of Gnome2. People who liked Ubuntu when it was pretty much just Debian with a simpler installer and better defaults for a desktop might want to try Mint Debian Edition.

Agreed, Mint mostly has all the benefits that Ubuntu has to offer over Debian, while removing the drawbacks introduced as of late. I still prefer straight Debian on servers, but out-of-the-box Mint makes for an excellent desktop or HTPC.

So you're a Linux user who doesn't think "principle" is important? :)

It's just another "I'm leaving and taking my toys" rant. I don't really get why these things get so much traction here.