Switch baby switch!

Posted by Hollow on April 6, 2011

Many of you who have followed my blogging career (Limited as it has been) will know that I am most definitely of the Debian crowd when it comes to Linux. Those of you who’ve been really reading, will also be well aware of the fact that I have switched my allegiance a few times, between Debian raw and the *buntu distros. Anyone who really really knows me, knows that this is largely because of my unfortunate need for cutting/bleeding edge tech. Not that *buntu comes with it as standard of course, just that it’s an awful lot easier to install on *buntu than on Debian raw. The problem is, I may be about to switch again, for exactly the opposite reason that I used to like *buntu.

I had a conversation last week with a new friend of mine, who doesn’t particularly like *buntu, and isn’t that much of a .deb fan in general either, although he has no problem using Debian itself. The conversation went down the lines of how *buntu makes everything quite difficult if you’re spending lots of time in the command line, because they make everything different to what most would call "native Linux" like Fedora, SUSE or even Mandrake (Now Mandriva of course). I explained, that my reason for using *buntu over Debian, was a combination of the cutting edge stuff mentioned earlier and the sheer fact that if I install Debian, I have to spend hours getting the things I want to install, installed, where as in *buntu, it’s just easy. It installs itself quickly (Not something Debian can really claim, even though it is faster than some others), sure the partitioning is bogus, but then you can change that and do it manually. Installing all the stuff you need/want when you’ve installed the OS is simple, most things can be done with apt-get, what can’t, can be downloaded in .deb format and everything really just works, for a desktop machine I’m talking about here, then you simply remove the stuff you don’t want from *buntu and all is well, you’re up and running in no time. He agreed with my logic, but still wasn’t convinced.

Unfortunately I’ve gone and proved myself wrong anyway, and now I’m going to admit to it on the internet! :O

I tested both Natty Narwhal and Debian Squeeze this weekend in a VM, only about 30 minutes each to be fair, but that was enough to make me start thinking about switching back to Debian. I once wrote a blog post about Debian Etch and how awesome it was, so enthusiastic was I, that Distro Watch and Debian both used the review as one they were proud to point to, similar things happened in my review of Lenny a couple of years ago too. Now I’m going to have to do one on Squeeze, because to be perfectly honest, it’s just awesome. It installs quicker than ever before, which is really simple to do as well, the ability to start in easy install mode, then switch to expert when you decide you don’t like the partitioning it’s creating, or you realise you want to install the web server now, not later, is legendary. On top of it’s speedy installation time, it actually installed in my VM, where Ubuntu did not, even after enabling 3D support and upping the memory available for graphics in the VM, Natty would not even run from the live CD, let alone install. This was a big plus for Debian Squeeze and a big fat FAIL for Ubuntu, if I can’t test it in a VM, I’m unlikely to use it as my desktop OS. Once you get past the Debian installation, there’s the configuration to look forward to, yes I said look forward to! Not only do most things apt-get now, but the installer even asks you if you want to enable the unsupported and non-free repo’s, I’m sure it never used to do that.

Firefox and NVidia drivers still seem to be manual install only, but then I don’t like the NVidia drivers that *buntu installs through aptitude anyway these days and firefox is so simple it’s unreal. I used to get problems with the Debian sim-linking to Ice Weasel even after installing Firefox, but this time, it just worked immediately, I haven’t tried installing the NVidia drivers yet, since I haven’t actually installed it on a proper machine yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be just as easy as it is on *buntu.

When I’ve written my review, I’ll be sure to post it here, the trouble is, I may have to install it before I get round to writing the review, so it may take a few days.

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