Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

It's weird. I used to love Ubuntu, but after 8.04 I just stopped liking it. The little things niggled away at me. The bloat, the fear of upgrades breaking things (this is why my main home file server still runs 8.04, something I'm not happy about) if you have a slightly nonstandard install. I switched to Arch for my main home laptop and breathed new life into a PIII-850 with 128mb of RAM. Ubuntu would've killed it.

In a bizarre twist of fate, work requirements meant having to use Windows Vista (the horror!) then 7, where so far the best feature seems to be "It's not vista", so no more Ubuntu at work for me, except through VMs.

Still, Ubuntu did a heck of a lot to make Linux easier for the masses, and I have to say thanks to all those at Canonical and the Ubuntu community that made it possible.

Weird. Its since 8.04 and onwards that upgrades STOPPED breaking things for me. Its been a golden era for Ubuntu.

It seems like since 8.04 they've changed the package naming conventions for LaTeX twice. That's been the biggest pain about upgrading for me, everything else has been a breeze.

I think they inherited that transition from Debian, where it's also been a bit of a pain. Part of the mess is that it wasn't just repackaging/renaming, but a switch of upstream sources too, which weren't exact drop-in replacements for each other--- teTeX hasn't been actively maintained since 2006, so Debian (and most other distros) shipped to TeX Live as their new upstream.

Yeah, I set up disk encryption for all my partitions except for /boot which If I remember from the install (6.06 LTS) wasn't a standard option at the time, upgrading to 8.04 caused me a whole load of grief.

I know I should rebuild it and it'll probably be fine, but if I was going to rebuild I think I'd use Arch instead (just a personal choice).

But the VMs of Ubuntu that I use of newer versions, yeah they're great.

I run AwesomeWM on top of minimal Ubuntu install, and I enjoy the best of both worlds. I get access to the whole .deb racket while at the same time getting rid of all the bloat. But you're completely right about upgrades breaking things. Since Jaunty, I can't remember a single upgrade which didn't make me thank god for Dropbox.

XMonad also works fine.

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