One user's experience with Debian Lenny (not me)

[GomJabbar]

I was browsing the Mandrivausers.org forum and saw this blog by Artic (a moderator there) and his experience with Debian Lenny over the last two months. I thought maybe some here would be interested in reading it. Debian lenny preview

FTR, I personally have not tried Debian Lenny (or any previous versions of Debian for that matter). I did play with a couple of Debian-based distros (primarily Xandros), but I find I prefer the rpm-based distros such as Mandriva.

[poshgeordie]

With Ubuntu being debian based, then hats off to the Ubuntu software compilers for making a distro that is as good as debian apears to be bad.

I haven't tried debian so cannot make any real comments other than the above!

[GomJabbar]

As I understand it, this is a beta release, so I doubt Ubuntu is yet using this bleeding edge stuff. --Then again, I don't really know much about what Ubuntu is doing.

[tom lightbody]

"lenny," it should be realized, is the testing distribution--
beta, as gom rightly says: problems are to be expected.
The current release is "etch" and that works just fine.

'tis easy to avoid "gnome": just leave out
"desktop environment" and then download whatever
packages you require: such as gcc, swisswatch,
zile...etc. Personally, when going GUI, I favor fvwm2
with a 6-console setup: the editor for one, firefox for
another, a few bash terminals, plus some eyecandy on VC
number one: maze, my "to_do" list, xeyes, xload, a
favorite picture....

I have it semi-automatic, so that using debian's
net-install, plus apt-getting 15 or so packages, plus
some local stuff--aliases, /etc/rc.local, /etc/hosts--
I can get a machine setup in about an hour, mostly
unattended.

[lightweight]

As I understand it, this is a beta release, so I doubt Ubuntu is yet using this bleeding edge stuff. --Then again, I don't really know much about what Ubuntu is doing.

Ubuntu is pretty much a snapshot of Debian's Testing with some Ubuntu-specific packages, often versions of which aren't even in Debian Experimental. So, most agree Ubuntu is the more bleeding edge distribution, whereas Debian has always been known for having a huge repository of packages, many of which were slow to update, Debian's Still in Development and Experimental branches excluded. For example, Ubuntu's newest branch apparently uses the 2.6.27 kernel even though its still in development under Torvalds's git tree, whereas Debian has only recently added 2.6.26 to Lenny. Ubuntu (and Knoopix, etc)'s appeal for some time was that it took such a stable distribution (Debian), provided good hardware detection and fresher, out of the box applications. Its loss of appeal is bloat and the departure from it's parent distribution's trees and philosophies. It seems clear with Debian Lenny (the current testing branch) Beta 2, which installs compiz along with Gnome on the "Desktop" option, that Debian is adapting to the user who wants bling and an easy install.

(Debian stable stays static for three years, during which time testing is adjusted and vetted. Debian's current testing branch is Lenny. Its Still in Development branch [SID] and Experimental branches are closer but come with the disclaimer that if you break it, you bought it .)

While that reviewer's experience with the snapshot installer is disappointing, most Debian users are like Tom where they prefer to net install, get a terminal quickly, dist-upgrade to Lenny if they want it, then build out their system. While going from Etch to Lenny will install some unneeded packages -- the 2.6.18 Linux kernel, for example -- it sure is easy.

FWIW from a Debian fan.