It’s hard to say which seemed less likely six months ago – Apple switching to the Intel architecture, or the Debian project releasing ‘sarge’. Both happening on the same day is just amazing.
Still, congratulations to the Debian team. All I need now is for someone to explain to me the relative pros and cons of Sarge vs. the latest Ubuntu…
I thought that was obvious….
Ubuntu: Desktop. 6 Month release cycles. Up and running in no time!
Debian: Server. Release cycle? Stability!
Common: Conservative package management. So if you want a bleeding edge system you need to add some .deb sources, “unstable” in Debian and “backport” in Ubuntu. If you really want to live on the edge you can try Ubuntu Breezy (development version). Currently more unstable than Michael Jackson but give it a couple of months and it will be a great place to try new Gnome stuff.
Shetil, that uses any chance he get to pimp Ubuntu.
The key difference for me is that Ubuntu is first and foremost a desktop distro. By default, the installer gives you a working system with GNOME, with funky hardware detection stuff I don’t understand but use, and with a slight change to your sources.list, all the software that’s available in Debian. (For GNOME-haters, there is a KDE version, Kubuntu.)
Debian offers a less frantic release cycle (though with sarge this has gone too far, I feel; hope they get that sorted for etch) and is still probably better suited to non-desktop (i.e. server) installs, although a couple of years into the life of a release it can be pretty frustrating to be stuck with years old software.
I run Ubuntu on machines I sit at, and Debian on remote ones, and this is roughly what I’ll continue to advise people to do, at every opportunity.
Ubuntu is every bit as good on a server as Debian. While I have used Debian on both desktops and servers in the past, Ubuntu offers commercially supported core packages including what I’d run on a server.
Keeping server packages more up to date than Debian’s release cycle is a good thing IMHO. Woody was still offering MySQL 3.23 as “stable” until yesterday…