[Bobboau]

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#bt

I is seeding it...

[Bobboau]

[Bob-san]

Downloading now, defying uni rules against torrents. They block it too, but this is 100% legal software so they can shove it up their ass.

[S-99]

Ubuntu? If you couldn't tell that all of their 6 month releases are buggy in either big or small ways, then what's that tell you about an lts release? It tells you great things, except for the wierd ass hybrid x server of 1.7 and 1.8. It's that horrendous for 10.04, they couldn't just support one or the other instead? And for 3 years with an over over patched x server 1.7, we'll see where this goes. Did they fix the memory leak in 10.04 x server yet either?

Sorry, just more proof that anything with a 6 month release is not release worthy. Don't use mandriva, opensuse, ubuntu, or fedora because of this.

[el_magnifico]

Ubuntu? If you couldn't tell that all of their 6 month releases are buggy in either big or small ways, then what's that tell you about an lts release? It tells you great things, except for the wierd ass hybrid x server of 1.7 and 1.8. It's that horrendous for 10.04, they couldn't just support one or the other instead? And for 3 years with an over over patched x server 1.7, we'll see where this goes. Did they fix the memory leak in 10.04 x server yet either?

Sorry, just more proof that anything with a 6 month release is not release worthy. Don't use mandriva, opensuse, ubuntu, or fedora because of this.

Let me guess, you're a Debian fan.

[S-99]

It's not that i'm a debian fan of which i am. Fedora, mandriva, opensuse, and ubuntu all follow the 6 month release (well i'm not sure about opensuse). And all release fairly close to one another. Because of this, they all use the same or similar versions of linux subsystems and utilities like the kernel, xorg, etc.

One bug that may be prominent in a version of mandriva may be the same bug you find in ubuntu because of nearly synced releases (different distributions with nearly synced releases have a lot in common). After that, you can have a release in 6 months, but a lot of it ends up half assed or just not as good as it could have been.

Since i like debian, i use mepis exclusively. On the other hand there's other awesome stuff out there like distros based on arch linux. And don't forget pclinuxos.

Pclinuxos and mepis are very similar in the fact that they center around the time necessary for something to be ready for release and stability with whatever necessary properly working backports at the same time. What makes pclinuxos and mepis different? Pclinuxos is rolling release while mepis is not (pclinuxos is rpm based while mepis is not, but i'm not getting at differences between packaging right now).

Among me hating ubuntu is that stuff like kubuntu and xubuntu used to be a labor of love and an awesome product, but they've fallen so behind so much, who cares, ubuntu should drop those projects (kubuntu has been plain, uninspiring, and had no innovation since the last lts release). Also, there comes distros based on ubuntu, which are equally as bad as normal ubuntu (linux mint 8 which is based on karmic koala was just as much a disaster as normal ubuntu karmic koala).

I got my reasons for championing awesome distros like mepis, pclinuxos, and arch.

I like stability and bug free software. In the mean time, i don't get along well at all with rolling release quite yet, and i definitely don't get along with the fact that rpm based distros don't have repositories as big as debians (compiling from source can get ugly and i dont like installing packages not from the repositories).

[Topgun]

I hate Ubuntu, they change so many things for no reason, super buggy, and not binary compatible with Debian, basically on purpose.
Me? I like Arch.
I also like Debian. and I agree with S-99, a release every six months is silly, every year is good, but any faster than that it might as well be rolling release.

[Mongoose]

This thread is so far into nerd-dom that it actually makes me feel like a non-nerd.  Thanks, guys.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I tried ubuntu 9.10 (Koala) for a couple weeks. Then it broke. I haven't been able to recover any data from it. Uninstalling now.

[S-99]

I share your pain with karmic. For some reason, when you uninstall proprietary video drivers, there's a 50/50 chance you'll be stuck at a command prompt next time you restart. That and the fact that the cd sometimes wanted to eject when you pushed the eject button for any cd or dvd. If the eject button didn't work, then right click unmount then hit eject.

Karmic had a lot of small niggles that made it unsavory.

[Fury]

Hrm. Lot of you people are forgetting to take one important point of view into account. One that of administrator. And I'm not talking about your usual home kind of an admin. I'm talking about being an admin for large number of workstations or servers, or both.

In both cases predictable release cycles can be very important. With unpredictable and presumably long release cycles software can become quickly outdated which then requires manual packaging, versioning, distribution and maintaining of newer, compatible binary packages.

Okay so, you have a debian workstation or server. It's stable and as of this moment fresh enough to have decently up-to-date packages. But what about two years from now? Debian is infamous for its slow and unpredictable release cycles.

So, what about rolling release distros like Arch? Well, they might be okay in some workstation environments but are far, far too prone to breakage. And often requires manual attention to updates due to their nature. Doesn't work well in servers and most types of workstations. Unattended maintenance doesn't really work with rolling release distros.

So what about Fedora and other rpm distros? Well, this is just my personal opinion but all of them suck. Why? Because they do not properly support on-the-fly distro upgrades. This can be really annoying pain in the ass, not only on workstations but especially on servers. Upgrading Fedora on numerous workstations and servers can prove to be so much work it's usually better not to, but requires you to supply new hardware and take old one for reinstall. A hassle that eats hours of work time.

And we're back to Ubuntu. It has predictable release cycles, fresh packages and all advantages that Debian has. Not to mention it is packed up by Canonical, an actual company that can offer myriad of services for those who need them and can pay. Now, don't get me wrong. I really do not recommend using the latest distro, ever. It is much wiser to keep 1-3 releases behind the latest. Personally I would keep two releases behind the latest distro, that should ensure all important bugs have been squashed. Ubuntu also has LTS (Long Term Support) releases, allowing you to upgrade from one LTS release to another. Again, I'd rather stay one LTS release behind.

I agree that 6 month release cycle is often too short. But you really don't have to use the latest, not even at home.

[cloneof]

This thread is so far into nerd-dom that it actually makes me feel like a non-nerd.  Thanks, guys.

+1

I'm saved!

[el_magnifico]

This thread is so far into nerd-dom that it actually makes me feel like a non-nerd.  Thanks, guys.

Thank you! ^^ Now I'm beginning to feel integrated in the general atmosphere of this community.
Now, if I could only get that welcome beaming I've been waiting for years by now...

Hrm. Lot of you people are forgetting to take one important point of view into account. One that of administrator. And I'm not talking about your usual home kind of an admin. I'm talking about being an admin for large number of workstations or servers, or both.

In both cases predictable release cycles can be very important. With unpredictable and presumably long release cycles software can become quickly outdated which then requires manual packaging, versioning, distribution and maintaining of newer, compatible binary packages.

Okay so, you have a debian workstation or server. It's stable and as of this moment fresh enough to have decently up-to-date packages. But what about two years from now? Debian is infamous for its slow and unpredictable release cycles.

So, what about rolling release distros like Arch? Well, they might be okay in some workstation environments but are far, far too prone to breakage. And often requires manual attention to updates due to their nature. Doesn't work well in servers and most types of workstations. Unattended maintenance doesn't really work with rolling release distros.

So what about Fedora and other rpm distros? Well, this is just my personal opinion but all of them suck. Why? Because they do not properly support on-the-fly distro upgrades. This can be really annoying pain in the ass, not only on workstations but especially on servers. Upgrading Fedora on numerous workstations and servers can prove to be so much work it's usually better not to, but requires you to supply new hardware and take old one for reinstall. A hassle that eats hours of work time.

And we're back to Ubuntu. It has predictable release cycles, fresh packages and all advantages that Debian has. Not to mention it is packed up by Canonical, an actual company that can offer myriad of services for those who need them and can pay. Now, don't get me wrong. I really do not recommend using the latest distro, ever. It is much wiser to keep 1-3 releases behind the latest. Personally I would keep two releases behind the latest distro, that should ensure all important bugs have been squashed. Ubuntu also has LTS (Long Term Support) releases, allowing you to upgrade from one LTS release to another. Again, I'd rather stay one LTS release behind.

I agree that 6 month release cycle is often too short. But you really don't have to use the latest, not even at home.

Yes, but if you have to maintain some really critical system that has to be really secure, stable and reliable at all times, then Debian is perhaps the best Linux distribution for the job. It also features more packages than any other distro. And packaging things you have compiled yourself or adding other repositories is quite easy to do, so you don't have to be that outdated, at least in the desktop.

However, I have to admit I'm heavily biased here, since I've never used rpm distros, and I have been using Debian Sarge and Etch as desktop OS until just a few years ago.

Just my humble opinion.

[S-99]

In both cases predictable release cycles can be very important. With unpredictable and presumably long release cycles software can become quickly outdated which then requires manual packaging, versioning, distribution and maintaining of newer, compatible binary packages.

Great point. I think it'd be better suited for ubuntu to switch over to yearly releases. That'd give more time for releases that work good. It'd also still be timed releases, but in this case, more solid releases. And no more crunch time for lts releases. 6.06 was a good lts release, so was 8.04, 10.04 on the other hand is a mistake.

Ubuntu dev's and the community contribution for bug hunting are still fixing the many bugs in 10.04. I had high hopes for this lts release to be awesome, because quite frankly ubuntu's been fantastic with their lts's. The 10.04 iso's are currently being respun, and new bugs are still being fixed. At least the x server bug was fixed, but the state of the hybrid version of x there using suggests that it's going to be a pain to support. There's also a grub2 error that will make it so that you can only boot ubuntu and nothing else if you were looking to dual boot either linux or windows. There's also other stuff. But, the way i see this is that the 6 month release cycle is really catching up with ubuntu devs meaning more bad decisions are being made because the time crunch is just getting tighter for them, in this case a lot with 9.10 and 10.04. 9.10 was horrible, idk if many of you realized. 9.04 was the last great working ubuntu. I still have my mom using 9.04 because 9.10 sucked, and i don't want to move her over to 10.04 even though that'd be awesome (no touching the laptop for 3 years, but since 10.04 sucks right now).

There's also the state of the ubuntu bug system. Old bugs don't get flushed out, critical bugs often do get marked as not important, and other stuff; it's a mess. 10.04, some bad decisions were some stuff was settled on what version of something they wanted to use, sort of like my example of x in 10.04. 10.04 uses a heavily patched x 1.7. It's patched so much, it's pretty much a x 1.7/1.8 hybrid. This is what the big memory leak found in 10.04 a couple of days before release was caused by. They redid the patches, so that the leak didn't happen again. But, in my mind, why couldn't they settle on x 1.7 or 1.8? One or the other is easier to support than some hybrid flipper monster that they've made x in 10.04 that they need to keep from spilling it's entrails for 3 years.

[QuantumDelta]

Downloading now, defying uni rules against torrents. They block it too, but this is 100% legal software so they can shove it up their ass.

Universities don't ban torrents because of the legal 'hubbub' about them.
They ban them because of the amount of bandwidth a torrent will expand to consume if given the chance.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Downloading now, defying uni rules against torrents. They block it too, but this is 100% legal software so they can shove it up their ass.

BitTorrent was MADE for things like this.

[Bob-san]

Downloading now, defying uni rules against torrents. They block it too, but this is 100% legal software so they can shove it up their ass.

Universities don't ban torrents because of the legal 'hubbub' about them.
They ban them because of the amount of bandwidth a torrent will expand to consume if given the chance.

We've gotta T3 line; it'd be pretty tough to saturate it and it's typically <20% in use. A smart thing for the uni to do might be to limit connections to 64kbps or something if you're torrenting; fast enough to be worthwhile while slow enough not to saturate the network; it'd take about 400 clients to saturate the line at 64kbps, not including local peers.

[S-99]

If you don't want to get kicked off of campus innertubes, a good way to do torrenting is to set your upload and download speeds to something non detrimental to their network. Also there is limiting to how many people you seed to.

I never uploaded more than 25kbps at any given time. I set my download to infinite since my upload speed is going to determine what i download at. Then i never shared past 6 connections.

Your campus may tend to kick you off the innertubes when you're going balls to the wall uploading to as many as 50 more people in a torrent.

[QuantumDelta]

If you don't want to get kicked off of campus innertubes, a good way to do torrenting is to set your upload and download speeds to something non detrimental to their network. Also there is limiting to how many people you seed to.

I never uploaded more than 25kbps at any given time. I set my download to infinite since my upload speed is going to determine what i download at. Then i never shared past 6 connections.

Your campus may tend to kick you off the innertubes when you're going balls to the wall uploading to as many as 50 more people in a torrent.

My point, however, was that not everyone knows how to do this, and I haven't bumped into a campus yet that's split networking between users quite like above ;P
Though, I have only been able to abuse 4 campus internet connections up 'til now, and they were all British, who are notoriously bad at managing internet usage.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

My point, however, was that not everyone knows how to do this, and I haven't bumped into a campus yet that's split networking between users quite like above ;P

I had that twice. Apparently, my school network imposes a temporary ban on individual computers accessing sites not relevant to studies, such as this one.