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by hackoder 5226 days ago
Debian is fantastic. I tend to stay on testing (wheezy atm) because it is fairly modern yet stable.

Stability is the biggest problem with Ubuntu I believe- people will generally adapt to the UI changes that canonical is making, but breaking stability is a complete no-no. Even today, on Ubuntu 11.10, Unity shows wierd bugs time and time again. Apps like VirtualBox and KeePassx will show multiple times (or just disappear) in the dock. And sometimes the whole unity interface will close and restart itself.

Compare this to the old gnome2, or xfce, openbox etc; You can go for months without the UI doing anything unexpected.
2 comments
kristianp 5226 days ago
I'm looking around for alternatives too after using 11.10. I have been happy using Ubuntu for about 3 years.

Is there anything Ubuntu adds that I would miss in changing to Debian? Not including the Unity interface of course.

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oakgrove 5226 days ago
The main difference is Debian isn't quite as user friendly out of the box. Sudo isn't set up for you for example so you'll be in for a surprise the first time you try to use it. Also, Debian isn't quite as pretty. The fonts aren't as good and the desktop looks quite a bit dated. The upside is Debian at least for me is much faster. I don't know what Canonical did to Ubuntu 11.10 but it drug for me. Also, Debian doesn't crash at all at least for me whereas Ubuntu did suffer some random instability.

That having been said, I like the idea of Ubuntu. I like the fact that they are trying to move the Linux desktop forward and I will happily return if they can get Unity straightened out. As it stands though, I'm a content Debian user for the forseeable future.

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SkyMarshal 5226 days ago
Interesting, I've been using 11.10 on a netbook since last fall, and on a new laptop since January, incluing daily use of VirtualBox and KeePass(2, not x), two of my top 10 most frequently used apps. Zero stability issues, I've been very happy with it.

I wonder if there's some hardware issues, or something else you've got installed that's causing those problems.

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hackoder 5226 days ago
Hmm. This was a fresh vanilla install that I tried recently on the same hardware that runs debian wheezy. I wanted to have all the benefits of ubuntu's large community (PPAs for a lot of sofware etc, plus I do generally agree with the direction that ubuntu is heading in), but the lack of stability was just killer.
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