Debian Lenny beats Ubuntu Hardy

OK, here's the situation: Ilene and our little girl need to use the $0 Laptop. So you figure, "new users, go for Ubuntu."

Well, after having them on Ubuntu for a week, I've switched them over to Debian Lenny, which I dual-boot on this Gateway Solo 1450.

Why?

Well, I think my inability to print to a USB printer is the result of a hardware problem inherent to this Gateway. Printing wouldn't work in Ubuntu, Debian or Puppy 3.00.

But the matter of accessing a USB flash drive is another story entirely.

I just don't have time right now to screw with Ubuntu to get some basic but needed functionality. I was able to mount the USB drive only once after I added the users to the disk group. Yep, the drive mounted, but at the next boot it did not. One of the solutions has something to do with going into gconf and making a slight change.

I'm sure I'll be able to do that eventually, but since Debian Lenny allows me and my users to work with USB flash drives immediately, that's what we're using.

With the switch from Ubuntu to Debian, I lost Suspend/Resume, but I'd rather have the ability to get information on and off of this computer via flash drive than Suspend/Resume, which I will eventually be able to figure out in Debian anyway.

And the little girl's games -- Gcompris and Childsplay -- work much better in Debian than in Ubuntu. It's apparent that the package maintainers for these two educational suites are much better in Debian than they are in Ubuntu. Hey ... isn't there an Edubuntu version of Ubuntu? Well, when it comes to these two huge FOSS educational applications, Debian does a better job.

I always say that Debian is more polished and ready for the average user that it ever gets credit for. But I always turn to Ubuntu in new-user situations due to its clean menu layout and other "extras."

But when it comes to the GNOME environment, and -- more importantly -- essential functionality, Debian Lenny is ahead of Ubuntu Hardy at this point in time.

I'd love to get my USB printer working, but I need to do some more tests. USB is working (I'm using a USB keyboard and mouse right now), and CUPS finds the printer and suggests a driver, but the jobs don't go to the printer. And since it happened in three different distributions, the problem is deeper than Ubuntu or Debian.

What's the take-away? That Debian's desktop installation is very much ready for both new and experienced users, and if the given box's administrator can properly configure the environment, just about any Linux (or even BSD) distribution -- Debian and even Slackware -- can serve as a solid computing platform for users who've never seen a FOSS desktop in their lives.

The keys are maturity, stability and functionality. Since I'm administrating this computer, have the best luck getting Debian to behave and find in its repositories software that is a) more complete and b) very stable (even in Testing), that's what we're going with.