Linux

well, next to being able to help novice users, I never saw a reason to switch to ubuntu in first place.

debian has non-free & contrib parts of repos, you just need to specify it in their apt-line whether you want to install software from them or not.

me (using i3wm.org) never used any kind of desktop; I don't need filemanagers, I know howto operate bash.

I3wm is just the most effective way to manage screenspace for my GUI applications which would be:

 - XTerms (yes truckloads of them, thats why they're first in the list)

 - Iceweasel (most of my GUI stuff runs there..)

 - Emacs (also some windows to the same Editor distributed over several screens & desktops)

 - KCachegrind

 - sqldeveloper (yack java crap...)

 - jmeter (yack more java crap...)

 - soapui (and even much more java crap)

and on testing or debugging icedove or evolution, ekiga now and then... and thats it.

deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian wheezy main
deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian wheezy non-free contrib
deb-src http://debian.netcologne.de/debian sid main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.netcologne.de/debian experimental main
#deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-aurora

all codecs installed which are needed.

no big deal.

want xfce?

apt-get install xfce

done.

want bleeding edge? install wheezy (testing) which is what ubuntu also aggregates from.

want real bleeding edge? install sid (which may break now and then.)

other than being a n00b or wanting to helb n00bs there is no good reason to use ubuntu.

Just make a step sideways and try Linux Mint (ubuntu based, dunno which desktop, but even more targeted at having more sophistication and ease with preinstalled codecs and whatnot) or Bodhi Linux http://www.bodhilinux.com/about.php (more minimal approach, as it seems and enlightenment 17 as desktop). Or any other ubuntu clone. As a debian hater, I'd say you try Suse or Gentoo :-)

thats what all those angry ubuntu/debian diskussions are about anyways.

Ubuntu primarily pulls stuff more frequent from the debian testing tree, and calls it "stable"

I'd guess their installer is better or at least looks better. There must be a reason why noobs switched to ubuntu by the dozens. Installer is important for those windows users who see reinstallation as a proper way of problem solving and do so every few month. Also, synaptic makes it easy for ex-windows users to get a working system. 

Wed Oct 26 2011 09:49:45 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Well, I think one of the reasons Ubuntu picked up so many n00bs so quickly is because for the first few years, they'd send free CD's to anyone who wanted them.

I do remember at the time that Ubuntu's desktop was just so much better looking than anything else out there. Nowadays I'm not seeing much of a difference.

you probably didn't compare it to SuSE or Mandriva...

Does anyone use Slackware anymore? That's what I started on (well, after SCO OpenServer); was great for learning the guts of the system.

I fear I will burn in eternal slacklessness...

I always wanted to try it, since SuSE seems to be derived from it. But than again, it seems to involve too much compiling on your own and I can already do that in gentoo and more elegant, as it sounds to me. But I might try it just to praise the man with the pipe. 

I thought that Ubuntu's advantage is its user community. It should be quite easy for a beginner to find help by browsing a little bit through the www.

I tried Ubuntu 11.10 here at work. Unity was quite OK, but too slow (maybe it was a broken RAM module and not unity). I'm running fedora with fluxbox now. I would have preferred gnome3 but it doesn't support my graphic card.

well, I don't run SID on my netbook just for the shake of the many disk operations (flash you know...)

before, I did that.

my home desktop (which I access mostly via ssh..) still runs SID.

my worst scenarios were X not starting, which was fixeable by rtfm & nagging others on IRC.

my $work workstation usualy runs debian stable for half a year or so until the next testing is more stable again (theres a little rush after the freeze, you know? ;-)

my last upgrade to testing failed due to disk space, and I needed to boot it with grml since I fucked up my libc. took me some extra hours in the office that day.

The upcomming 8.10 citadel release requires bleeding edge libev; which i3wm.org (which I sometimes compile from git...) also uses.

Had a fukup with that too, required me to recompile & install my windowmanager from the commandline, roughly an hour or two without X.

You know, all these fuckups might be challanging to fix, be a bit anoying, but I prefer that over having to turn my carpet into direction Me aeh Redmond, fall down on my knees to get my box back up & running once it fails.

Thu Oct 27 2011 12:57:16 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Ok, so I'm converting my primary development machine to Debian. Let's see how this experiment goes. If I like what I see then I may begin switching my desktops eventually.

I also happen to be in the market for a new server Linux, since we're not happy with CentOS 6 here.

run

dpkg-buildpackage

to get a list of all missing software to compile citadel.

If what you really want is ubuntu with the other x desktop why not just install the x desktop. Save yourself all the reinstallation grief. debian doesn't buy you anything else, what's th epoint.

Quite true, and that is in fact what I have already done.  At the moment I am evaluating strategies for new installs.

But more interestingly: what's wrong with centos? Is redhat going down the wrong path of some kind?

In the couple of weeks that we've had CentOS 6, we have had a number of machines just completely blow themselves up.  Their implementation of ext4 is, for some reason, unstable under certain types of storage.  The same storage works fine with ext3 or with a non-CentOS distribution.

Add to that the fact that Red Hat has added even more unwanted crap to the "minimal" install that we have to turn off for every build.  Bloody acres of enterprise-ey daemons and services that are irrelevant in a service provider environment.  Debian doesn't give you anything you don't ask for, which for a service provider is awesome because there are no listening ports open by default, no extra services consuming memory and disk, etc.

And my big question of the day: all those ubergeeks who are working on the up and coming versions of whatever distro they're working on... what do they actually RUN on their development machines while they're doing their development. Seems to me that would be a good question to know the answer too.
If a alpha of a distro is just plain broken, they're not going to be using it wHILE they're fixing it, so what ARE they using?

They use Windows, silly.