Coming Full Circle: Back to Debian
While some may cringe in horror, all must know the truth: After nearly three years with Kubuntu, I have made the switch back to good-old, reliable Debian.The truth is, I got tired of all of the little issues which crept up in recent releases. It would seem that as the entire *buntu family moved farther away from their collective Debian roots, their stability decreased and all the new features rapidly became points of difficulty and malfunction. Key features would fail or randomly stop working when no major system changes had been made. Sleep (suspend) only worked episodically and upgrading to a new distro version failed miserably with each release, thus necessitating a full re-install.
Furthermore, the “bleeding edge” nature of Kubuntu’s six-month release cycle often left me with plenty of bugs and no where to turn. This only served to further highlight the lack of support both from official sources as well as the community. The wiki is full of holes and devoid of support documentation considering that so many pages just detail use cases for certain packages or provide a justification for why packages deserve to be included in future releases. Hardly an effective resource.
The community support outlets are also sub-optimal. The IRC channels are crowded and poorly manned so there are a great many people asking questions and precious few who are answering them. Even a quick search on the forums yields multiple threads all pertaining to one topic because so many opt not to search before opening a new discussion. That being said, the Debian IRC channel isn’t exaclty known for having a warm-and-friendly atmosphere…
All of these things combined to make me rather annoyed with Kubuntu. So in response, I wiped my root partition and installed Debian. Thus far, I feel it was a good decision. I installed stable (in the words of my roomate “Debian stable is the bunker under the mountain“), got the absolute basics working before upgrading to testing before putting in the heavy stuff.
Almost everything worked as soon as I installed it. The good thing about fixing issues in a distro as dependable as Debian is that once you fix a problem, it’ll basically stay fixed until broken. Furthermore, bugs that I encounter are bugs directly related to the software and not some wonky configuration or environment issues made present by Kubuntu. Sleep works fine and I have yet to find any of the “deal breaker” problems that I was constantly forced to work around with Kubuntu.
So far, so good.
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While I do agree that Kubuntu is a bit unstable, I do wonder which IRC channels you visited. I watch and chat in #kubuntu on Freenode a lot and I’d say at least 70% of questions are answered in some way, which is pretty good compared to most of Freenode.
I haven’t actually experienced any major issues with Kubuntu myself (my soundcard doesn’t work in Gutsy, I guess, which would be a big deal for some). I do always do a full reinstall when “upgrading” though as the upgrade app never seems to work properly.
I certainly wouldn’t run it on a server but for my “portable desktop” laptop it’s been perfect.
I used Debian for a couple of years when I was starting out and, whilst I found it to be a good distro (which I still use on my server), I found the community rather elitist and unwelcoming and the website almost entirely useless. Perhaps I just happened across some bad apples.
Interesting; I keep finding annoyances with Ubuntu, and definately wouldn’t use it for a server setup any longer; but desktop wise it seems ok - although I know it’s bugs and work around them…
Interesting post: I think that to those of us used to “Debian-like” stability, (K|X|whatever)Ubuntu brings with it a general good feeling of work done on desktop integration, but with a rather disappointing number of new bugs. This seems to be what you’ve found, I guess.
I still use Ubuntu on the desktop, but I’ve got used to it not being quite Right-In-A-Debian-Sense.
Maybe this is not so much *Ubuntu’s* fault, but rather a feature of any *desktop* that tries to make things easy for the user?