So, I am what some people have been calling "old School". I started out when Potato was released. That was about 15 years ago. I used it for porting, testing and in fact, used to do testing or unstable just to help me understand more and test stuff out. 

Wow, a week of fallout is intense. 

Personally, I like using the CLI. It saves time, resources, and such. Ubuntu has some nice features but I definitely am not drinking the Canonical Kool Aid.
What I really liked to do back in the day is port stuff to Debian because a lot of companies were doing it for RH and didn't care about Debian. Another thing I liked to do is test out hardware - this card, this module. 

The truth is Debian is free software and that philosophy was one I agree with. I had a fully free machine when I attended college. I finished my degree with no proprietary software whatsoever for my undergrad. Also, everyone I knew was using Debian, Richard Stallman, Emmett Plant, Don Marti. Of course, these are the Masters and I, alas, just a Journeyer (well on Advogato, that is).

Debian is kick ass for learning how things work, getting things to work, but, does take time and devotion, right.
At least I can stand by a community effort and not some proprietary commercial entity.
I'm not saying Canonical hasn't done some good things. Sure. I just don't like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Hannah Montana Buntu... 

Also, I prefer Raspbian on my Banana Pi. No Ubuntu there. 
So, I know everyone has their own likes. 
For example, I really did like Knoppix. It's a solid tool. Ubuntu would never let me know "why" something is throwing an error. It just throws it.

What I think - Debian has been and always will be my friend ;)

Of course, you could ask 100 people and 100 different opinions may be had. I'm not saying mine is right at all. Debian is right for me. I try other distros. In fact, I'm going to try Arch on my banana out of curiosity. 

I have tried Mint. MInt is nice. It all depends on what you want to do also.
I suppose as far as community is concerned, if you drink the Canonical Kool Aid, you can hang with that crowd.
If you like Dead Rat, you can hang your hat, 
If you like Debian... well, let's just say, it's a different portion of the community.  :)

Come into the light, Michael!!! :)

On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:
Ahh, debian lurkers!

Just out of curiosity, not to hijack the thread, but don't find a lot of pure debian users... what train of debian are you and/or most people using for desktop, if not just servers?  Curious what others are using if not the usual ubuntu flavors of deb, or raw debian even.

Ubuntu's become mostly a basketcase where I spend as much time removing, disabling, fixing, or hunting bugs in literally everything I do that I felt it's time to move on.  I can't remember the last time I upgraded clean without spending a week with fallout.  Wait, yes I can - about the time Unity replaced things, and they did away with debian installer.  Whodathunkit.

Figure go to the source, but debian has been an adventure in itself.  I used cinnamon debian mint on my laptop with a haswell chip, and the graphics are buggy with anything that attempts to use GL.  Go figure, Intel is always a winner here.

I used Mate-based debian mint on my desktop, which is apparently an adventure with new hardware on a z97 chip, 2nd gen haswell, and my trusty ATI card which sadly I still cannot replace with an nvidia to drive my 6 displays. Couldn't upgrade to 3.15 with z97 patches (damn ati), settled on a 3.11, and tossed in a usb sound card for now until ati wakes up and updates the driver for 3.15 with alsa fixes.

I thought to go pure debian, but was hoping mint debian would prove a bit better.  Admittedly, once working it's been fairly good, but lots of weird bugs/caveats too - just wondering what the consensus is around it.

-mb


On 07/25/2014 03:25 PM, Kaoru Wilbur wrote:
Yeah, I think I have a SuSe disk from like 2001. I did make some money on that Novell stock when they bought SuSe. The road trip thing sounds interesting to me. I want to see what they have to say... I'm not expecting anything amazing, and I am Debian dedicated but am open to seeing what else is going on.

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