On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 10:20 -0600, Kyle Waters wrote: > I'm suprised by the statement "Given Ubuntu's reputation for stability > ". At my work I tried to get them to use something deb based instead of > rpm based(I'm a long time debian user), but we had to give up on ubuntu > because a lot of mainstream desktop packages were buggy compared to > their fedora(and debian counter parts). Talking to other people about > their experience I always had the impression that ubuntu moved quickly > to make sure the newest stuff was in each version and this often led to > a lot more buggy packages than any other distro.
Depends on which packages you're talking about. My experience with the core Ubuntu packages has been very good. However, most people don't limit themselves to official Ubuntu packages but also pull from universe and multiverse. Many packages in universe are pulled from Debian Unstable and massaged into an Ubuntu compatible state. Universe is not officially supported, sometimes the timing of the unstable snapshot is unfortunate. I've had some notable quality problems when using packages from universe. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/components Contrast that with Fedora and Debian unstable. Because Ubuntu doesn't ship nearly as many updates, its easy to mistake that for being "more stable" when sometimes it's actually "more abandoned". Of course it cuts both ways. Fedora is more apt to ship something not quite perfect because "it'll just be fixed in the first wave of updates". Debian unstable makes it very clear that you're getting a work in progress. Ubuntu, on the other hand, puts a lot of effort into making sure that what they ship (at least in main) is reliable. You wouldn't encourage work to use Fedora, you'd recommend RHEL or CentOS. (If you're sane.) So why recommend Ubuntu+universe when Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS w/o universe is more appropriate? Perhaps you'll have more luck if you include what you're _not_ recommend with your recommendation. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
