Debian: Squeeze Me Out of Ubuntu.

Greetings earthlings, I hope you come at peace. I hope all of you who read this are in good health, and I hope everything is good. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a long time. I’m come to a slump where I don’t know what to post, and if I think of things to post I don’t do it for some reason. I think it’s just laziness, and writers block working against me which is not a good combination at all. Anyway, not to bore you anymore, I will write what’s on my mind about what I’m thinking of currently while I listen to Ravi Shankar.

I can say that Ubuntu is far in the past for me unless they do something very spectacular with any regard. I tried out Karmic Koala for a short while on three different occasions, and the best performance that I can justify was in the second, or third alpha. I don’t know what it was, but it just seemed very fast and kicking. I loved how it outperformed anything with any respect. The speed of the alpha was very nice, and then I didn’t realize that I had sound issues right away. Pulseaudio was very problematic, and I’m not a very technical user so I couldn’t fix it. You’re asking, “Well, what was wrong?” right? Well, the sound applet would dramatically increase with a small increase to the volume level of the applet. So I had ear-blistering sound in a touch of a button, I guess you’d call it. Plus, every so often the sound would make this wear sound where it sounded like something would timeout, and there would be a loud thump coming out of the speakers every so often. Then, I thought, I’m going to give Debian a try. So I tried Debian: Lenny.

The second time the same persistent bugs were still active, but this time it was the first and only beta release where the developers were almost ready to release Ubuntu: Karmic Koala on time. Though, this time with the lack of performance, and the sound issues — I still couldn’t come to grips with it. And, I went back to  Debian: Lenny. With the lack of up to date packages, slightly older than any Ubuntu release, I couldn’t handle it. Hell, I couldn’t even handle not having Gwibber. I decided to experiment with Debian: Squeeze, so I upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze.

This brings me to the third time trying Ubuntu: Karmic Koala. I decided for the hell of it with a perfectly working Debian: Squeeze I would try the official release of Ubuntu: Karmic Koala, and boy was I in for a treat. It was all themed to go, it looked really nice as a non-LTS release, the sound was fixed. I only had a problem with the loud thumb-zap coming out of my speakers. I found out a prognosis, and quickly fixed a configuration file some the thing wouldn’t time out. I googled it, and I can’t tell you what it was. Sorry. Anyway, despite being a official release, and lack of performance I still had, it felt really good. But, it also felt a lot more geared towards people who are want to try Linux, and or Ubuntu and to get into the world of Free Open Source Software. Then I realized that, Ubuntu was no more for me, and that I’ve gotten over it. It’s a great distribution, possibly striving to be the best, but I find that Canonical is pushing in the wrong direction and that Mark Shuttleworth is only pushing for the capital venture of what he makes off Canonical and its services and will break out communal efforts of Linux by the pushing of specific Ubuntu related services. (There will be more on this later, possibly on another post, and a lot more in-depth.)

For all the times I’ve tried Debian — I think about five, or six times within the past two years, I never thought I would ever run it. Debian seemed very hard to run because it was different than Ubuntu, and Ubuntu was so much more user-friendly. But, I do have to say that, I wish I did start of with Debian first so I could veer off and not use Ubuntu. I would have generally learned a lot more running Debian, and I am learning a lot more administrating my own laptop.

Debian:Squeeze has been so solid for me, I love it. I haven’t had anything crash for me since this installation, and by that I mean, NOTHING has crashed. When I installed it, I recorded a Daily Build of Squeeze on a CD. I will do this from now on, or at least try to push the developers to enable people to be able to install from USB. I’ve been doing so for the last year. This is the first CD I’ve made in a while, and kind of regret it because it’s a waste of money, and space. Not that it’s lonely with all the other CD’s I have in the stack, but because it’s harsh on the environment and I could have just reused my USB drive by putting the ISO on unetbootin. YES, it’s in the Debian repositories, though I wish it wasn’t made in QT. Loathe installing dependencies that are not generic to the GNOME Desktop Environment. Loathe thee. Not to end this on a negativity, I was just trying to be funny.

If you were deeply saddened by the last paragraph of this blog post, I’ll happily show this video:

I couldn’t get a nice video of Debian in YouTube, or Vimeo, so I guess I’ll leave a URL of the user, and video of the best I could do. On that note, I guess write you on the flip side.

Peace.