On 12/24/2014 08:48 AM, Stephen Partington wrote:

i like the Ubuntu release cycle a great deal. they have a long term support release, and then incremental releases on a stability and then feature swing each year. this to me is a great model.

I fell in love with Ubuntu from the 6.04 to 10.04 days after learning to hate using RH in any linux environment I'd worked in, but after 10.04, it's pretty much just a lesser evil. I like the release cycle for a server, as rarely do I need anything bleeding edge there. As a desktop, it more or less sucks however. More often than not, I find that in order to fix some terrible bug annoying me, I have to upgrade the distribution. Not a big deal, but every release between 10.04 to 14.04 was a horrid process, almost always bricking my system in some new, creative way and ruining gconf profile data that caused weird gtk issues across the whole desktop even when I did get the system back.

The parts i did not like about red hat, even as a server, i spent more time compiling applications than anything else and fiddling them all into place. while educational its REALLY nice to have repositories that do this for you. and yes there are a number of bundled repositories you can bolt on to redhat/centos, but they never quire gave me the breadth of access i ever needed so i was back to building applications i wanted to use. in the end what i wanted to do was just easier with debian, then ubuntu came up with a much more modern installer and that was where i really became comfortable. easy to use, and able to recognize 95% of all the hardware i have ever thrown at it. and to top it off some of the easiest and complete chunks of documentation and support.

To this day, I find RH and Cent to still be dysfunctional in this fashion, where anything in repos is so dated or horribly buggy/unusable that isn't common application, you end up compiling it yourself. Then I get taken back to 1999 and get reminded of when I learned the term "dependency hell" that old solaris guys used to joke about RH being "immature", but this is still common. Anything newer you might want to compile will require you update enough of the os you'll likely break old and new system components alike, ending up with some broken abortion of an os in the process.

The equivalent in debian-ish builds is breaking apt trying to force in 3rd party packages out of necessity. Luckily Ubuntu tends to keep somewhat modern that you don't end up having to rebuild the os to compile something, where I've generally had good luck doing that when needed, but finding compiled packages for new software is a crapshoot.

Throw in a GPU for desktop use (or specialized network nics with vendor-provided blob drivers), and you create all sorts of new adventure trying to find a stable driver build that works with anything but a "stable" release on any distro. So much time is spent working around xorg these days to make buggy software like compiz work (you know you *need* wobbly windows), ubuntu often outpaces the gpu vendors, especially amd to make a driver work in anything newly release should you *need* to upgrade distributions.

It's about impossible to win these days with a general solution for everyone, both server and desktops.

I guess what i am saying this is likely a similar path that allot of people have taken, and this is giving ubuntu its real market share.

I'd tried recently mint, fedora, and cent as an out from Ubuntu, finding all to be horribly buggier for my needs than Ubuntu. I simply fell back into complacency, figuring out a way to live with ubuntu again with a clean build until the next release cycle breaks it again. At least canonical didn't ruin their netinstall iso, yet.

-mb