What possessed the morons at Canonical to build the current version of Ubuntu from the testing version of Debian. Would Red Hat be as stupid as this?, and build their Enterprise Product from the same sources as the current version of Fedora?, or Novell produce Suse Enterprise products from sources that had not been well tested and proved to be up to the task.
This is the value of proper Linux Enterprise Products, why it is worth you paying for them. These products are well tested,stable and reliable, defiantly a finished product (not like Vista which turned out to be more like Win 7 testing).
I like working with the Debian way of doing things, especially the apt packaging system and the large quantity of applications that are available, and most importantly, Debian Stable really does mean stable.
I do a small amount of work for clients I have known for many years off my own bat, and as I get older, children move away from home, and I can live off less income, I wish to eventually work only part time for myself. My old windows CAD software is now getting a bit geriatric and could do with replacing, my one and only remaining Windows machine could be retired and the space it takes up put to better use. As luck would have it there are 2 viable options to run CAD on Linux. http://www.bricsys.com/en_INTL/index.jsp and http://www.varicad.com/en/home/ Bricscad is an Autocad clone, windows version, well developed and much better value for money than Autocad and the Linux version is ready for commercial use. Varicad has always been available for Linux, with each new version getting better and better. Compared with other 3D modeling CAD has always had good value for features available in software, but interface, a bit unwieldy an slow to use, but is rapidly improving.
I am definitely going to purchase one of these products, and for a job I have just taken on, Varicad would be the best choice, as it has all the 3D modeling capabilities I could do with on this job, but due to the blind promotion of Ubuntu as serious enterprise desktop replacement, some software produces are building their deb packages from Ubuntu rather than the true stable Debian sources, Varicad is one of these, Bricscad is not.
Ubuntu by using the testing Debian sources is placing itself it the same place as Fedora, a toy to play with, with all the bells, whistles and shinny bits to play with. Debian, though not promoted as an enterprise product, is as well tested as those that are, it’s a bit of an academic project, an intellectual pursuit, with the object of this pursuit to produce as reliable, stable and functional Linux OS as possible. To achieve this aim, Debian stable has been well tested and debugged, Debian testing is still undergoing this process.
I personally find Ubuntu load of rubbish of an OS, with most of the features that make Linux my preferred OS buried in the default install. You can get ease of installation and hardware detection and setup in many Linux distributions these days, often much superior to Ubuntu, ease of installation being it’s main selling point, PCLinux OS has all these advantages, along with the Mandriva config tools, there are many others, all much better than Ubuntu.
At best Ubuntu is a toy to play with, with shinny paint and bells and whistles and flashing lights, at worst, a shinny turd that gets in the way of proper enterprise grade Linux. I don’t want to have to use the testing version of my favorite Linux to enable me to use software I desire, the half-wits at Canonical need to sort this out if they want to produce enterprise grade products and not play-things. They can always line up a testing version with Debian testing, and Debian unstable for thoughts that want to play about with the future as do Red Hat, Novell and other producers of real enterprise Linux