Forget Hardy

[Les Mikesell]

Peter Garrett wrote:
> 
> As far as Debian needing to be a mix of stable, testing and unstable in
> order to "work" - excuse me while I chuckle and chortle ... ;-)

Maybe you are lucky and have hardware old enough to have working drivers 
in stable - or you don't need applications that are unstable in 
unstable...  And you can laugh at people who aren't in that situation 
and pretend that there aren't long intervals when hardly anyone is - 
which is another reason for not using debian.

>>> Someone will probably pull me up on this - but as far as I can see,
>>> technically the Ubuntu way and the Debian way are practically
>>> identical.
>> Except when they aren't.
> 
> And that would be when, exactly? I was referring to the technical
> aspects and particularly the packaging system. Perhaps you can
> enlighten me...

When a new release is scheduled, and the schedule is followed on time, 
keeping you out of that situation where you need to mix pieces from 
stable and unstable.

>>> I think the issue with both "Debian" distros and Gentoo is that both
>>> have quirks.
>> All systems have quirks.  
> 
> Truisms are fun, aren't they?
> 
>> The difference is in how many are 
>> automatically handled by the installer and administration code and how 
>> many waste user/administrator time to get a working system. Ubuntu comes 
>> out ahead in this respect, but as a side effect it permits, even 
>> encourages, people who don't fully understand it to have systems that 
>> mostly work.  
> 
> Well, ... yes... and... ?

And with debian and even more so, gentoo, that doesn't happen.  If you 
don't learn about the quirks you won't have a working system.

>> And these people will sometimes answer questions on mail 
>> lists incorrectly with something that just happened to work for them 
>> which is more of a trigger for rambling threads like this than the 
>> newbie question that was posted in the first place.
> 
> Not really sure what your point is. I don't see how this is peculiar to
> Ubuntu at all, if that is the implication.

The unique thing is the number of users that haven't had to learn how to 
fix things the hard way.

> As for rambling threads - I
> see them as an interesting symptom to be diagnosed. In other words, I
> ask myself and others the question as to what causes them - and I don't
> think that's about Ubuntu enabling people to have half-baked ideas
> about what "works". I've seen those on a lot of lists.

The concept isn't unique, but the kinds of problems and ratio of users 
who know what's under the GUI is different.  That is, there's not much 
reason to ask a simple question about Ubuntu, because if it is simple 
the installer will already have done the right thing, and there also 
won't be a large number of people on the list who have just had to fix 
the same problem.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com