In defense of Debian only

Posted Aug 21, 2008 11:58 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: In defense of Debian only by jengelh
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

it puts the swap partition (when using a blank disk) on sda5 even though there are like 3 primary partition slots left.

Various other OSs have issues booting from non-primary partitions. Why waste them?

installation went through without asking me much but then it decides not to start a DHCP client in the installed system

Default behaviour on a desktop install is to bring the network up when a user logs in.

Trying to boot with vga=0 to get an 80x25 screen and a sane font. Framebuffer is still started. Stupid.

No, it's not. The framebuffer is never started by default except on platforms that require it. The graphical bootsplash does not use the Linux framebuffer layer.

It took them incredibly long to do a 64-bit userland right whereas other distros had it for years.

The 64-bit userland has been basically identical since 4.10, which was released in 2004. What's your actual technical objection here?

No distro way to set up bridges (in /etc/sysconfig/network), you are stuck with the bare brctl commands.

From /usr/share/doc/bridge-utils/README.Debian.gz:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.2
    network 192.168.1.0
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    broadcast 192.168.1.255
    gateway 192.168.1.1
    bridge_ports all

Which looks pretty much like a distro way to set up bridges. Sure, it's not in /etc/sysconfig/network, but that's because network configuration is done in /etc/network/interfaces.

All your other complaints seem to be "This isn't configured in exactly the same way as other distributions" (which isn't a terribly compelling argument) or just plain inaccurate. There are plenty of things that Ubuntu can be criticised for (and ditto any other distributions), but frankly I don't think any of the ones you've picked fall into that set.