Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Debian: The (not-so) Great Migration

I too am doing the unthinkable: migrating some of my systems from Ubuntu to Debian 5.

I didn't know much about how the Ubuntu development process works when I started using linux... I just knew it was one of the more popular up-and-coming distributions. A few years of experience have taught me that Ubuntu is fantastic for ease-of-installation, but often leaves something to be desired from a long-term maintainability perspective. Dist-upgrades have frequently caused me problems even when I've stayed out of the Universe and Metaverse repositories, which is actually very impractical for a desktop machine. To be fair, a lot of the issues have been related to proprietary drivers, but I really don't have the time to mess around with that stuff if I can avoid it.

I learned to do clean installs rather than upgrades, and manually reinstall all my needed packages. This is still not quite as frustrating as Windows upgrades have been, but it really makes upgrading a chore and is a big waste of time.

Since I've been using Ubuntu for daily use since 6.10 or so, Debian stable seems like the best middleground between what I know, what I need, and overall stability.

I admit that I haven't really tried sticking with just the Ubuntu LTSes. I thought about switching to the LTS path instead of Debian, but I'm concerned because I know there were a ton of problems with 8.04 right after it came out. Basically, Ubuntu seems to treat their LTSes as "just another release" without really testing them any more vigorously than the others. Of course they become more stable over time as bugfixes are released, but it's still not an ideal situation

I suspect 10.04 may run into the same problems unless they start focusing on getting it stable NOW instead of continuing to add new features. At least the Debian project doesn't tie itself to a particular release date so they can wait until the release is actually finished and mostly free of critical bugs.

I'll probably keep using the latest Ubuntu release for 'toy' systems like my eeePC that I don't rely on to do any real work, just so I can see the latest fun and eye-candy (but even the eeePC has been affected by a serious driver regression in Ubuntu 9.04... alas). In general QA has become more important to me than "the latest feature", so from now on Debian is probably what I'm going to reach for when stability really matters.

Not that I know for sure Debian will be any better in regards to dist-upgrades, but hey, I can hope! If I have to move to CentOS to find the stability I crave, I'm going to cry.

Edit: Turning off Compiz and using GNU screen seems to have solved most of my complaints related to Ubuntu's stability, but I'm loving Debian Lenny too.