I have both installed for a few years now (Debian on Desktop and Server, Ubuntu on Laptop). First of all every article mentioning something like "I switched recently and everything is fine" just gives me a little sad smile. Yes - every Distro after a fresh install will usually work pretty well by now. Problems tend to show after using it daily for a few months. My experience is that new Ubuntu versions tend to mess u…
> Pretty much every Desktop application where you want > newer versions is simply not available. I'll never understand why this argument is made so frequently. The only explanation I can think of is that I use entirely different apps than most people do. I use Debian Stable on my desktop computer, and I have the latest, or nearly the latest, versions of the apps that I use most. I use backports, third-party repos, an…
And well, I mentioned backports and binaries and compiling stuff yourself etc. But that has it's own share of troubles. Problems I had with backports for example had been package conflicts and missing source dependencies, which means hunting problems in there sometimes already fails in the "get shit compiling" stage. Then certainly not all apps are in there. A quick check for the apps I use often showed: Pidgin and xchat are in there (but both 1 version behind, which means several months...) while clang, Filezilla, MyPaint, Pencil and Audacity for example are not. A quick comparison on my Laptop showed that for all of those except Pencil (which seems outdated on both systems) newer versions are available at the moment in Ubuntu - in around half the time even the most current version. Also one gets a simple installer with the newest version for each of those (except clang) on Windows (just somewhat sad to see how it is often easier to run free software tools on Windows).
And this is still pretty much at start of this release cycle, experience tells me that it tends to get worse until the end.