Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2007 9:34 UTC (Sat) by lenov (guest, #15428)
Parent article: Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

"Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu"

Any quantitative basis to that claim?

I once moved from Debian Sarge to Ubuntu. It lasted 5 hours. After being unable to configure my laptop properly, I moved back to vanilla Debian and fixed my wireless in 5 min. And I am a user, not a developer.

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Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2007 11:25 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

"Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu"

Any quantitative basis to that claim?

For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

For Developers... it's not so easy to compare them: a lot of developers are both Debian and Ubuntu developers, patches are flying both ways, so it's not easy to say if developers "deserted the distro"...

It's typical story, actually: when seasoned Debian user moves to Ubuntu s/he usually expect for everything to be perfect: no fiddling with files, everything is autodetected and autoconfigured, etc. And when he founds that s/he still need to fiddle with configuration files and fix stupid bugs - he loudly blames Ubunty as "just another overhyped distribution" and goes back to Debian (as you can see only half of Debian users deserted the distro not 90%).

Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is significally more polished then Debian, but it's still far from being the ideal distribution...

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2007 14:07 UTC (Sat) by BeS (subscriber, #43108) [Link]

>For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

This is just a search statistic. Does it really mean that people switching to Ubuntu? It could also mean that people has the most problems with Ubuntu and therefore Ubuntu has the highest search quota. I think there are many possibilities to interpret this statistic but it doesn't show that users switching to Ubuntu.

Not so easy

Posted Apr 14, 2007 16:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

For users it's easy: you can see how people moved from all major distributions to Ubuntu.

The graph does not show the scale, so it is not so easy to discern anything beyond a general trend. Is the scale logarithmic, where is the zero?

Anyway, I see not so much a decline of existing users as a new population entering Linux. True, there is a slight decrease for all the others, but the cumulative result seems to be going up. However, according to this Linux is in decline itself. Go figure.

Not so easy

Posted Apr 14, 2007 21:24 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The graph does not show the scale, so it is not so easy to discern anything beyond a general trend.

Is the scale logarithmic, where is the zero?

It was the goal, I think. That's where "trends" in name comes from. Scale is not logarithmic (easy to see if you'll try queries with different popularities), but number of queries is "per million requests" (or something like this).

However, according to this Linux is in decline itself. Go figure.

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic. This means most internet citizens don't care about Linux - there are a lot of things to search: PSP, Wii, MySpace and so on...

Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Linux is in decline compared to all search traffic.

Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

Not so easy

Posted Apr 15, 2007 13:47 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Hmmm... So, it's perfectly possible that other distros have not lost users, but Ubuntu has grown the installed base?

May be. Search traffic is growing, Linux/Ubuntu/Debian searches are probably all growing too - but can we be sure that means number of users is growing too ? Nope: we need outside data. We do know that people were switching to Google in this period, we probably are using search engines more often today then we did yesterday, etc. That's why absolute values will give us more info about Google then they will give us info about Linux/Ubuntu/Debian... Relative values are quite reliable - unless masochistic Ubuntu users do 10 times more searches while trying to fix endless problems... Possible but highly unlikely...

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 16, 2007 4:56 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> Ubuntu is significally more polished then Debian

I recently migrated a computer from Dapper to Etch, and I much prefer Etch. Ubuntu's habit of changing KDE is very annoying.

Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 24, 2007 19:44 UTC (Tue) by johnwin (subscriber, #4711) [Link]

> Don't get me wrong: Ubuntu is significally more polished then
> Debian, but it's still far from being the ideal distribution...

IME the opposite is true; Ubuntu is significantly *less* polished than Debian, at least than Debian Etch anyway.

I used Ubuntu for a while, when Etch was still a fair way from release and I wanted the newer desktop etc. I got those but I also got buggy packages, a kernel build process which produces an un-bootable kernel and other irritants. It's not that Ubuntu is bad, but it doesn't have that ultimate polish which Debian's pathological testing gives it.

As soon as I realised that Etch provided both a stable environment *and* all the new packages which I wanted I switched back.

Currently my wife's laptop still runs Ubuntu. It's a persistent slight irritant that it isn't so polished and reliable as Etch, but not quite enough to get me to upgrade it.

John