DEBIAN VERSUS UBUNTU
Last month, I was rather vocal in my criticism of Canonical. Following that, I decided to go back to a ‘pure’ experience. I decided to run Debian 12 on my main PC. It was very different.
I respect what the Debian team does and excluding nonfree binary blobs. That said, the experience just wasn’t as polished as Ubuntu or other popular distros. It took work to achieve a similar setting and I was one of the users who got caught with the recent Nvidia binary blob, so no local AI generation for me. For several days, there was no real fix.
It shows how complex the software is under the surface. Binary drivers just make life easier. Experiencing these issues and with a deadline, I decided to revert to Ubuntu. Everything just worked.
While we may dislike binary blobs and the fact that big business is involved in our open source, it makes life easier. But without Debian, we wouldn’t have Ubuntu and the IT world would be much duller.
Debian is great as a stable distro that works and is reliable, with super-long support cycles. But, as they say, “Debian ain’t Ubuntu.” Users trying to install packages designed for Ubuntu package managers tend to break stuff. So much so that Debian has a page called Don’tBreakDebian: https://wiki. debian.org/DontBreakDebian
Finally, I’d forgotten how difficult it can be to purchase a guaranteed-to-work Linux desktop. This resulted in me buying a new desktop from my local provider and spending an extra £90 on a mobo with an Intel network and wireless, making a decent experience.