[TriLUG] Ubuntu: whats all the fuss?

[Alan Porter]

In short, I like Debian because of the package management.
But their ultra-pure free-as-in-speech attitude drives me nuts.
A Debian SERVER system is easy to install and maintain, but
you have to jump through hoops to install ATI or nVidia binary
drivers, multimedia codecs, or apps that are free (beer) but not
open source.  (And yes, they're even making a stink over the
Firefox icon).

Ubuntu builds on Debian's package management, but they are
pragmatic enough to include binary video drivers, vmware player,
and lots of other goodies that are free as in beer, but not
as in speech.  That means a lot of stuff "just works".

That being said, I have found that Breezy did a better job of
keeping everything in sync (that is, when the kernel changed,
new kernel modules were released for things like ndiswrapper
and vmware-player).  Dapper has not been so responsive in this
area.


Alan




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