[coffeeaddicted]

I have both installed for a few years now (Debian on Desktop and Server, Ubuntu on Laptop). First of all every article mentioning something like "I switched recently and everything is fine" just gives me a little sad smile. Yes - every Distro after a fresh install will usually work pretty well by now. Problems tend to show after using it daily for a few months.

My experience is that new Ubuntu versions tend to mess up things often, but I also notice that stuff gets fixed rather often within days. And otherwise one can find lots of workarounds and help thanks to a large and active community. That includes a workaround to disable the internet search for everything in the dash for example.

Debian is fantastic on the server and updates just worked there for me so far. On the Desktop on the other hand the situation is a lot more problematic. Old desktop software is generally just worse than newer one. And software on Debian tends to be outdated so much that I run constantly into old bugs which are solved often for months or even years in current application versions, but not yet in Debian. Pretty much every Desktop application where you want newer versions is simply not available. And applications generally won't get updated between release cycles because that's just not what stable does (except for security fixes). Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends to be a constant pain. So you start trying to work with backports, custom compiled versions, installing packages build for Ubuntu and whatever you can do to get applications you need running - which can cause more and more problems in your system and you will get less and less help from the Debian community because those are (understandably) not "their" packages.

When you bring up those problems the community often recommends using "testing" or "unstable" and while those generally have newer apps they are still mostly outdated. Also while most updates on testing and unstable work most of the time they did mess up my system once in a while on updates so badly that I tended to only update on weekends after a while to have enough time to fix my system before I had to work with it again for the week (which is why I switched to only using stable now for the last 3 versions, maybe unstable/testing have gotten better since then, I can't tell about that).

I still love Debian for it's policy and community. And because I can fix problems often myself (or with the help of the community) and hope that my feedback is useful once in a while and will improve it in the long term I still continue to use it despite the pain. But unfortunately I can't recommend any Debian version right now for the Desktop for people without good Unix knowledge unless they work only with a very restricted set of desktop applications (so might be fine for company desktops where users are not allowed to install anything anyway).

[subsection1h]

  > Pretty much every Desktop application where you want
  > newer versions is simply not available.

I'll never understand why this argument is made so frequently. The only explanation I can think of is that I use entirely different apps than most people do.

I use Debian Stable on my desktop computer, and I have the latest, or nearly the latest, versions of the apps that I use most. I use backports, third-party repos, and binaries that I download directly from upstream. For example, I get the following apps from the sources listed below:

Firefox - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

Google Chome - https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

Thunderbird - http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/...

Emacs - http://emacs.naquadah.org/

LibreOffice - http://packages.debian.org/wheezy-backports/libreoffice-kde

VirtualBox - https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/

  > Even finding a browser which simply runs on all websites tends
  > to be a constant pain.

Huh?

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/late...

http://mozilla.debian.net/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/?platform=linu...

http://packages.debian.org/chromium

[coffeeaddicted]

Things change all the time. Last time I searched (shortly after wheezy release when I first needed a newer Firefox and Iceweasel was not yet in backports) I couldn't find a current Firefox version build which worked on 64-bit Linux. So yeah - your link is one I haven't seen back then (not checking every week...) so I installed the nightly build instead which was recommended to me. Which worked for a while - until I think maybe 2 weeks ago when it first had some troubles on screen-updates, which got fixed one release later, but that fix-release broke flash (I stopped counting how often flash broke after an update by now, yeah, we all hate it, but still...). But thanks for the link, I will give that release you posted a shot next weekend - maybe I get a working browser back then for a while. Note - you can get stuff working again always in some way, but over the years I had to do that for a working browser over and over and over again every few months!

And well, I mentioned backports and binaries and compiling stuff yourself etc. But that has it's own share of troubles. Problems I had with backports for example had been package conflicts and missing source dependencies, which means hunting problems in there sometimes already fails in the "get shit compiling" stage. Then certainly not all apps are in there. A quick check for the apps I use often showed: Pidgin and xchat are in there (but both 1 version behind, which means several months...) while clang, Filezilla, MyPaint, Pencil and Audacity for example are not. A quick comparison on my Laptop showed that for all of those except Pencil (which seems outdated on both systems) newer versions are available at the moment in Ubuntu - in around half the time even the most current version. Also one gets a simple installer with the newest version for each of those (except clang) on Windows (just somewhat sad to see how it is often easier to run free software tools on Windows).

And this is still pretty much at start of this release cycle, experience tells me that it tends to get worse until the end.