Quote Originally Posted by Asai Nagamasa View Post
The reason Kubuntu is more 'up to date', is because it's not stable, thoroughly tested software and Ubuntu are known for pushing through untested software before it's ready (believe me I know). Yes you're getting something 'newer', but you're also getting something that's far more likely to break - and break it does.

KDE 4.4 should be in Sid soon - it wasn't last time I checked (still 4.3.5 I think?). Last I heard they were holding off due to the problems most other distros were having with it. Most of those problems have been ironed out now. It gets released "when it's ready".
IIRC the reason why KDE 4.4 is not in Sid yet is probably because of the fact that Debian has far more architectures for which a package must build correctly in order to be included; and at least one of those builds didn't make it to the finish line. And yes there *were* some annoying bugs in KDE 4.4 but those have been resolved. The other issues were in fact the Qt 4.6 threading bugs (segfaults). That too, is resolved, the version you'd need is 4.6.2 I think. Or at least it is resolved in Kubuntu 10.04 updated on 28 April 2010.

And no, having had KDE 4.4 I'd rather not go back to KDE 4.3.4. I guess I am just not patient to wait for 4.4. in Debian; knowing that by that time I can get a decent working 4.5 on Ubuntu. I run a simple AMD64 architecture; I couldn't care less about failing-to-build-on- alpha|mips|itanium|other-processor-I-do-not-own.

Debian Stable is used extensively for servers, including webservers of course where security patching and stability is a must. If you've ever tried Stable, you'll know that as a desktop it's also rock solid and dependable. As I've touched on before, backports are the best thing about Lenny. You can get most of the latest packages from Sid and Squeeze and put together a decent desktop with most if not all of the packages that you want. Mrs Asai's PC runs Lenny with backports and is nothing but dependable. I'm toying with the idea of upgrading it to squeeze though.
I have. Debian Etch (stable) was my very first Linux desktop. I thought it best to play it safe and get myself something ... “stable”. Stuff should work when it's stable, right? I found out quite quickly that just about every bit of useful documentation/guides I really needed to make things actually work (wireless, codecs, dvd menu systems) involved the ubuntu forums, particularly the posts made by more seasoned contributors. ... It was one of those things.

Oh yes, I knew of (and from time to time still use) the Debian wiki. It is useful for very specific driver related stuff. (Here is firmware blob x_y_z it works with kernel A_B-15 thru A_B-27, but for later kernels you need firmware u_v_w instead) It is much less useful for “I am new to this, help me with a guide” type of problems.

I've never had an "unrecoverable installation" from either fglrx and certainly not ndiswrapper either. If fglrx causes hard lock up, it's usually because you installed an fglrx module that wasn't built for your specific kernel. This is actually the circus that has happened a few times with Ubuntu at dist-upgrade time. In fact with any proprietary closed source drivers it's pretty much unavoidable.
Certainly it is. The entirely closed drivers are the very worst. But Debian does nothing to aid you with such drivers at all. This is a good thing from the “freedom” side of things: it provides an incentive to use & improve open source drivers. This is fine. But the bad side is that open source drivers do *not* always have feature parity with the closed ones. You still don't get proper power management with your ATI card if you do not use fglrx, for one thing. 3D acceleration is another such issue. For someone new to the entire circus, unaware of many of these issues I think the better offering is to accept closed source drivers if freely redistributable.

But it is not just those drivers themselves; it is also firmware. For instance to make your wirelss card work chances are you *will* need to install proprietary firmware. Where do you get this firmware, you ask? Well from the internet. It is certainly not part of a default installation. Which means that by default you end up with... incomplete drivers. That is a less than an ideal situation.

I found out more about that when I decided to quit Ubuntu for a while after a harddisk failure (aging, cheap laptop quality thing) and tried Debian Squeeze: you can't run the iwlwifi/iwlagn driver by default because... firmware is missing. When I tried to set up Squeeze on my grandma's laptop after similar failure I found out the same holds true for the p54pci/p54usb drivers (prism54): you need to download firmware in order to get it working. On Ubuntu: you don't. It's all part of the stock Linux kernel distribution (linux-firmware) but Debian takes it out because it isn't FOSS software. It is a purely “political” choice. At that time I certainly considered it the worse choice, too at least from the technical P.O.V..

So to me that statement that “if you want an easy time on Debian, renounce & lose your proprietary ways” is still very much valid. It is *not* trivial to find out about the right wiki page; it is *not* trivial to find out exactly what driver you need. The first depends on the latter; and the latter depends on quite a bit of knowledge about your hardware: such as the original manufacturer of the controller chips... With cheap commodity hardware that is not at all obvious.

The man page for xorg.conf is called 'documentation'. It's a config file and thus the man page needs to be extensive. These days in most cases you can get away without an xorg.conf anyway.
I've used Ubuntu on and off since 6.06LTS right up to 9.04 where I gave up and moved on to better things. 6.06 was the one I stuck with for the longest. That was a decent distro back in it's day. It's later on that it all went very pear shaped.
Yes I'm aware that the Ubuntu and Debian repos are not the same - but thanks for the info. I did not suggest mixing Ubuntu repos, that would be insane, I was talking strictly about Debian. You would not need "apt-get" wizardry" (or aptitude wizardry even) to mix repositories in Debian by the way. Mostly it depends on how you set up your sources.list. Though there are more elaborate ways to go about it yes.
In order for you to use a specific distribution version of a package you must either pin or set the preference 'scores' of that package; as well as enabling any additional repositories required. Otherwise you would simply end up with a newer version of *everything*. The usual reason for doing this kind of thing is to run a modern system; *except* for a specific subset of functions. For instance running PHP 5.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.

Now I sincerely do not understand where your updates to wreck the LTS come from, anymore? I've been using 8.04 until 9.04 and never had any upgrade wreck anything. I've used 9.04, quickly upgrade to 9.10 to 10.04 because of the X + ati driver issues. Currently looking forward to getting proper power management in the driver with 10.10, plus KDE 4.5.

The latest 'stable' kernel is 2.6.33-3 according to kernel.org. Sid and Squeeze uses a stock 2.6.32, but there is a 2.6.33-1 currently in the experimental repo which has some advantanges where the xorg radeon driver, DRI and KMS are concerned. 'buntu 10.04 LTS also uses a build of 2.6.32. So kernel wise they're the same.

I think the main problem here is the myth "debian is difficult" or "debian is out of date" or "debian does not play well with proprietary software". You need to actually try it out properly before coming to those conclusions. If then you still think "tried Debian preferred Ubuntu", that's up to you of course.

I am not saying Debian is difficult. Quite specifically it isn't any more difficult than Ubuntu is. But in order to run the same software you'd run in an Ubuntu release you have to do a lot more hand holding than you would have to do on Ubuntu. So it is a matter of time & effort more than arcane skills.