My company uses almost all Ubuntu. For the last 4 hours, I've been struggling with an issue on this Hardy server, whereas Debian works fine in the exact same respect. Ugh, the more I work with Ubuntu, the less I like it. Me: "Ubuntu, why does this work fine on Debian, and not on you? Why can't you be more like your big brother?!" Ubuntu: "You're always comparing me to Debian! Nobody understands me! Ugh!" *slams door* Me: <through the door> "What's to understand? You copy Debian, yet still manage to break everything!" Ubuntu: "You're just picking on me because of the way I dress! It's my form of expression, and you're oppressing me!" *sob* Me: "No, I... hey, why do you wear so much brown, anyway?" Ubuntu: "I, uh, just really like brown!" Me: "..." Ubuntu: "You know, it's a ... it's a very soothing color. Really." Me: "..." Ubuntu: "...OK, I'm incontinent and brown helps to cover up. I wish I was dead!" *cuts self* Me: "Uh, OK, well good luck with that. If you need me, I'll be out to dinner with Debian and Red Hat. Catch you later." Ubuntu: *high-pitched sobs from behind the door*
I agree with that statement. Ubuntu is filled up with all kinds of stuff, to help people that are new to linux with getting a complete system running after the install. But when you install Debian, you get a base system and optionally with options that you choose during the installation. So in that case you can install only the stuff that you really need for a specific server or PC. And that might also be one of the reasons why linux is a better OS on a server. But let's just face it, the installer of Ubuntu looks much easier than the installer of Debian, but if you're a certified network admin you should be able to use the plain installer of Debian without any trouble. Ubuntu is good for home users, but they should leave servers running on a distro that are designed to be run on servers, like Debian.
There is no way I would normally disagree with someone of your calibre when it comes to most things but one thing I will pick on is an issue I had recently with Debian. Now, you (AT) can roll your own kernel, build your own packages, more or less the same way I can brush my teeth or ride my bicycle. In other words with the greatest of ease. Why is it such a palarva, for a novice, to do something so simple as installing graphics driver for my nVidia card? With both systems (Debian and Ubuntu) I made no changes to the system. All was as installed "out of the box". Debian complained and complained. I tried both the Debian way and the nVidia way and in both cases, again without any special trickery, I ended up either with no compilation or a bad xorg.conf file. Ubuntu is not necessarily my first choice for a distro and as you know I always favoured the father rather than the son. However, the ease of the display driver installation is, well.... automatic. In all the time I have been using Linux, this has been one of the worst tasks I ever had to carry out and I have to say that in this instance I am grateful for ubuntu (Kubuntu actually). In all other matters, I have to admit that I agree. Ubuntu is ugly and I never feel very confident with their update packages...
I tend to not do that with servers unless I really have to so that they will be easily maintainable. That goes with any distro I can think of, except the source-based distros where you don't have much choice. NVidia works fine for me. I'm installing them the Nvidia way, since NVidia actually replaces the bottom 1/3 of X.org as part of the installation. It's way too easy for the hacked OS-provided way to mess this up. But, I was ranting about servers... if you're setting up 3D drivers on your server, you're doing something wrong. :chk: I was talking about servers... but again, I don't have any problems with NVidia in Debian at all. I prefer to build them myself, since it only takes a moment, I don't have to wait for the distro to package it correctly for the latest kernel update they've shipped, and the performance is a bit better when you build with your own optimized cflags. Yeah, the desktop is ugly; I've never understood the poo-brown color scheme. But again, this doesn't matter much on a server, since I'd never run unnecessary packages like X.org on a server! I only mentioned it since I thought it was funny. :O
Boy do I feel stupid...... hehe. :doh: Learn to :swear: read..... My point exactly. The way I look at this little issue is - If you need to get to work at 9:30 in morning, you are hardly going to start learning to drive at 6:00. You will take the train, or the bus. It is relatively safe and will get you there. Beats cycling in the rain or walking in the snow... Then you can learn to drive at the weekend.... However, if public transport works for you... then why not..... [on topic] - the emo bit was funny.....[/on topic]
Meh Inevitably one Linux distribution will rule and that'll be Ubuntu. Why do I believe that? Because the youth of today will become accustomed to Ubuntu because that is what most Linux desktop enthusiasts are using today. Just the same way that the youth of Windows 3.1 became accustomed to the Windows desktop and therefore decided that Windows as a server platform would be a good idea. If the youth of today grow up with Ubuntu, they will opt for Ubuntu on the server because it is what they are familiar and confortable with. I only got into Linux a couple of years ago (AT can count for my baby steps) and I've been thinking of making the jump from Windows admin to Linux admin. But I've been wondering whether it's better to train as Red Hat admin or wait a year or so until Ubuntu becomes more prominent. I honestly believe that Ubuntu will take over the Linux world.
Sorry, no. I cannot disagree more. As long as there is open source, there will be choice. Ubuntu cannot be everything to everyone, period. Compare Ubuntu to, for example, RHEL, Gentoo, or even Debian. Each holds in common the upstream packages (not least of which is the GNU core utils and the Linux kernel itself), this is true. But they are not exactly competitors with eachother in the sense that, say, SLES and RHEL are. Each has a totally different focus and methodology, a different and largely separate community with limited crossover. I've worked in 6 Linux/Unix shops in as many years, and pretty much each shop had a different distro they chose as their primary distro. That includes Mandrake, RHEL/CentOS, Debian, Solaris, FreeBSD, and now Ubuntu. So far, the Ubuntu stuff has been the most troublesome. It still works an assload better than Windows would in the same role, but it compares less favorably to the other distros I've mentioned in terms of performance, stability, and ease of maintenance -- at least, as compared to the Linux distros I've mentioned. In any case, RHEL has a completely different focus and methodology than Ubuntu. The testing and support are worlds apart. The focus and feature sets are largely disparate. In terms of career choices, it's worth noting that pretty much every shop I've worked in has had at least a little Red Hat here and there, if nothing else for Tier-1 database support, or for some other enterprise software stack that's only supported on RHEL. For that reason alone, my experience tells me it doesn't hurt to learn as many platforms as possible, but it can hurt to specialize too much.
On the topic of Ubuntu being a POS, I had a horrible experience Christmas week this year. I was visiting my parents in San Diego, and since it's a 7-hour drive we stayed for the week. My old man had a broken Windows media center made by Sony that never really worked right, and he's an Ubuntu fan himself so he asked me if I could help him get some variety of Ubuntu-based media center going. We installed at least 4 flavors of Ubuntu, both 32-bit and 64-bit, and went by-the-book in terms of driver and software installation. In the end, all four were a complete failure -- unstable, unwieldy, and ultimately unusable. After two days of doing things my dad's way, he conceded to give Debian a shot. I installed the latest nightly of Lenny, and the whole thing went like a dream. I rolled him a custom low-latency multimedia kernel for his specific architecture, and we added extra repositories such as Debian-Multimedia, XBMC, and Boxee (nightly builds). Everything works flawlessly, he has a web UI to control both the media center and the Vuze torrent software, and he can automatically rip several DVDs in the background using autobrake. To summarize the Ubuntu experience, XBMC was completely unstable and would lock up the whole desktop environment. Responsiveness was comparable to Windows XP on the same hardware, which is to say less than impressive. Some codecs were not bundled properly, so playback was crippled for at least a few formats. And mplayer, arguably the best video player out there, is completely useless as built in ubuntu. ZSNES, a fantastic, cross-platform SNES emulator, was broken right out of the box in Ubuntu (Hardy and Intrepid). Also, vsync never worked on Ubuntu for some reason, leading to nasty tearing artifacts on those files that would play. On Debian however, everything worked flawlessly. XBMC ran like a dream, being an order of magnitude more stable than the same build on Ubuntu. The OS itself was also faster and more responsive, even under extremely heavy load. All the codecs as built by Debian mainstream and the Debian Multimedia repo worked exactly as prescribed, meaning he could play just about any video or audio format known to man. And even the closed alpha release of Boxee worked well, meaning a beautiful OpenGL interface for local and web media (Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, etc). As for games, we were able to install a myriad of games and emulators, including the aforementioned ZSNES, right from the repos without any problems whatsoever. It all went so smoothly I could barely believe it myself, especially after struggling with the broken OS called Ubuntu for literally days. So it seems that if you aren't afraid of installing drivers as per the manufacturer instead of letting Canonical think for you, you will have a much, much better experience on Ubuntu's predecessor OS, Debian. One of the first distros, and still one of the very best.
