OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

[Emmanuel Seyman]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 05:19:15PM +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> 
> You can install testing any time you want:-)

I do from time to time (I'm a member of my LUG's install party team
and I install the 4 major distributions from time to time so that I can
better advise people). It lasts until something quits working (it's not
called testing for nothing) or until I get tired of downloading 10Mb
of updates every day.

Seriously, Debian's a good distribution but it is not the end-all, be-all
of Linux distributions.

> Be fair, in some senses Ubuntu is a Debian release. It's even done by 
> Debian Developers.

Yeah but it's different enough that you can't really say it's the same
thing.

> We were talking about the size of the pool of available packages to draw 
> on. FC has four CDs. Debian and derivatives have two or more DVDs - I've 
> not checked the number recently, but it's certainly more than one. Woody 
> was more than one.

Sarge will have two DVDs.

But how big does the pool of packages have to get before it's big enough?
Who cares about being able to install 13000 packages that he doesn't
actually need?

> There's not, but if you're creating the compilation then Debian gives 
> you a larger variety from which to choose.

Ubuntu proves that the six month release cycle is more important than
the amount of supported packages.

Emmanuel