Mikey-3 wrote: > > > 2) On a client, why is Debian better? For servers, you could make any > argument for any distro and I'm sure it would make sense on one level > or another, but I'm putting this on my lappie. > >
Its better because you don't have the upgrade/reinstall problem in the same form. The Debian releases are much less frequent. Etch, for instance, has been out for a couple of years. Within a release, you get the apps updated. However, within an Ubuntu release, you are not getting the apps updated, just security fixes. You may feel this doesn't matter, because Ubuntu does a new release every six months or so. But it does, because then you end up in Ubuntu reinstall issues, as Richmond and you have found. Debian is better because you are better off doing one major system upgrade very two or three years, and keeping up to date in the meantime by doing upgrades of the apps on a continuous rolling basis, rather than every six months being faced with the choice to stay with the older releases of the apps, or do a problematic clean reinstall. Its not a sensible way of running a distribution. This is why Warren Woodford took Mepis back to Debian: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html I would add that when you do want to do a total system upgrade, when Testing is moved to Stable, on Debian, apt-get dist-upgrade does work. Its been properly tested. Its impossible to do proper testing on dist upgrade if you are trying to get it out every six months. And the forums show that. You have the same issue, though on an annual basis not a six month one, with Mandriva, but the nice thing about Mandriva is that if you don't want to do administration from the command line, you almost never have to. For some of us this veiling of the system in gui wizards is a positive disadvantage, but it has the benefit that if you put in Mandriva for someone, and show them the control center, they feel at home right away. And with Mandriva, at least recently, the clean installs of major releases, as long as you have put /home on a separate partition, seem pretty foolproof. Peter -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-OT--Ubuntu-8.10%3A-headaches-and-nothing-else.-tp20870256p20890510.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
