On 5/4/06, Matt Waters <wate0155 at metnet.edu> wrote: > Man, all this technical stuff I'm gonna need to remember is making me > mighty glad I'm taking the Linux for programmers class in the 2007 > spring sememster. =) > > I remember someone saying something about how Ubuntu is great as a > desktop distro. I tried mail-ordering CDs once, but every single CD > turned out to be bad. Any opinons on how Ubuntu rates against Debian > before I go through the trouble of grabbing new disks? If you want things to just work, especially with newer hardware and with newer versions of software, I think Ubuntu has the upper hand. I was running Debian on my desktop for several years, and loved a lot of things about it, but there were a couple things that annoyed me slightly, and they're inter-related. The first is that the software in the stable distribution is really old. Even though a new stable version was released not too long ago, it only has GNOME 2.8 (which is the thing I'm most interested in) while GNOME is now up to 2.14. Because of this, most people who run Debian on the desktop use either the 'testing' or 'unstable' versions. The unstable versions of Debian are generally pretty safe, but this leads to my second issue: you are using a constantly evolving code base, so whenever there's a major transition (for example, the recent C++ ABI transition was rather painful for me since I develop in C++) you run the risk of your desktop being partially broken until things settle down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has stable releases every six months, so you get fairly recent software, but you don't have the drawbacks of a constantly churning software base. Ubuntu also provides some minor customizations and utilities for the desktop, but the main difference between Ubuntu and Debian is just that Ubuntu makes releases often enough to make it worthwhile to run the stable version. Other than that, there's not a lot of difference. So it depends on your goals. If you're just looking for a Desktop that works, Ubuntu provides all of the advantages of Debian without a couple of significant disadvantages. If you really want to dig in and learn linux, then maybe Debian is the better of the two options, but either will work fine. They're both great distros, but for the desktop, I'd give Ubuntu a slight edge. Jonathon