Why I'm running boring ol' Debian Lenny, Part 1
I bet many of us have been trying to pound square pegs into round holes at one time or another.
It's the same for me with operating systems. I made the semi-conscious decision to run Ubuntu at least in part because so many others run it, the articles I wrote about it would theoretically have a larger audience, and didn't Ubuntu's commitment to the desktop mean that things would work better than in (fill in the blank)?
Lately, however, I had so many problems with Ubuntu, problems that I had to Google and try various things in order to fix. And with every release, more problems. Had I stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy), I might still be using it. Maybe a kernel update would've solved my problem with intermittent crashes while using my USB WiFi stick. Maybe Flash as supplied by Ubuntu would play better with PulseAudio.
Sure I gained functionality as I moved my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 through 8.10 and 9.04 to 9.10, but especially in 9.10 on my particular hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 made about 2001, I think), problems just keep happening.
I was already thinking of bailing from Ubuntu. When the laptop's screen developed a crack that slowly and then quickly spread across the entire LCD, making it unusable, I rsynced everything twice onto separate backup drives and pulled out my second Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, which has been running Debian Lenny for awhile with fully encrypted LVM (which I installed as a way of testing the performance of just that -- fully encrypted LVM, and I can tell you now that I don't notice any lack of performance due to the encryption).
Lenny is pretty much where Ubuntu Hardy is in terms of apps and their relative ages.
And just as with Hardy, only more so (no networking issues), Debian Lenny is running great and doing everything I need it to do thus far.
Even with encrypted LVM, the Lenny laptop seems a great deal quicker than the Hardy/Intrepid/Jaunty/Karmic laptop with identical hardware.
Sure, Debian Stable is boring. There's no fanfare every six months about the next release (and if I wanted newer everything, I could upgrade to Testing, currently Debian Squeeze).
You'd think that the whole idea of Debian Stable is obsolete in the age of Ubuntu and its mix of LTS and six-month releases, along with the six-month cycles of Fedora and OpenSuse.
Not true. Debian Stable exists for a reason. And for my particular collection of needs and hardware (I'm running Lenny on three machines now, with Etch on my Apple G4), Debian is what, in my mind anyway, works best.
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Hi Steven,
I initially ran Ubuntu when I first made the switch to Linux from OS X on my G4 ibook. I ran the community PPC version of Hardy and was generally happy with it. When a new release came out I tried it and it failed to install or boot correctly. This led me to try Debian Lenny out and I was very impressed well things worked. The performance difference on my underpowered ibook between Debian and Ubuntu was really apparent. The more I learned about Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu I began to feel less excited about Ubuntu. While I didn't run Ubuntu anymore I of course paid attention to the new releases and news articles. As the popularity of Ubuntu grew even some of my friends who ran Windows wanted to try Ubuntu out. I was shocked to see that one of the releases Intrepid or Jaunty wouldn't even boot to a Live session on common HP and Toshiba laptops. This led me to get them a CD of the Hardy LTS release which worked quite well for them. This type of experience has led me to question the direction of Ubuntu as from what I can gather they used to be more cutting edge, and now they seem stuck in trying to be as stable as Debian but also cutting edge like Fedora, but in my mind the end up being neither. Anyway sorry for the rambling comment. Keep up the good work.
Mike
I have to agree with the author. After running Ubuntu for 2 releases I had nothing but problems. I switched to Lenny shorly after its release and have never been sorry. Using debian-multimedia.org, backports.org, and VirtualBox's debian repos, I get everything I need. A current kernel to support ALL the hardware in my box (including a TV tuner card, webcam, wireless nic, and RAID card), codecs to play multimedia, and virtualization for running Windows to assist clients. I should also say that I have been running non-gui debian servers for years now, but finally gave the desktop a go after deciding to give up Windows at home and after almost a year, I am very pleased with it.