The past six months iv'e been looking for an alternative to Ubuntu 7.10 which is my OS right now. Been using Ubuntu linux since 5.04 and i guess i'd never expect it to be as bad as it is now. With 8.04 LTS on the street one should figure that it would be greater than ever, but the fact is that it's not running properly on my machine. I tried to fix the bugs for a week and a half, or so, but gave up, just too much to fix, while it ought to work almost out of the box as 7.04 did, not to mention it's predecessor.

To make a long story short, i'm not quite satisfied with 7.10 either, but have put up with its small bugs, having in mind that there-would-soon-be-a-new-LTS

I quite like the synaptic way, so much that i'm not prepared to give it up just yet, so i tried PClOS but it wasn't what i was looking for i guess. Now i would like to hear about Debian and it's last stable release. Is it as great as i (kinda) hope / expect. I know, i know, fetch it and try it out, but i'm tired of reinstalling OS right now. I must have done it five times the past four weeks alone, just to try something out and get disappointed again and again.

So can anyone recommend the latest Debian linux release, and what is the up and down sides to this OS?

....Oh, and thanks in advance

Debian isn't better than Ubuntu if you need hardware support.

Stable release doesn't mean that it's rock solid and won't break. It only means it won't get any upgrades besides security updates.

Imho: Just try it, then you'll see if you like it or not.

maybe give the new fedora or the upcoming opensuse a shot, the latter seems to be very kickass compared to its predecessors from what I heard.

I have debian on my slave computer. It's a good distro. The whole sudo thing teaches people bad habits but it's good for people who are used to windows.

Anyone tried pclinuxos?

Yup, i did but didn't like much.

What's wrong with the sudo thing?

Well it's some years ago now, i last used windows.

It's a bad security habit. Albeit more secure than a windows administrative account, but still hackable.

Yeah well, if it's the only thing witch will stand between me and a system that don't provide stupid notes at startup, regarding how difficult it is to start the gnome interface, i'll gladly give it a password every once in a while.

Ubuntu and debian work exactly the same when you need a password. The difference is when you use debian you type the root password. When you use ubuntu you type your own, personal password. It's really not that big of a deal. There are people who think sudo is the worst thing that ever happened to linux but on a practical level it's not that bad of an idea, at least for a personal computer. Certainly if you're running a dedicated server you don't want sudo but I think most people understand this anyway.

FYI you can create a root account on ubuntu and disable root / install sudo on debian.

Just out of curiosity, what happens if you use the same password both for user and root, in Ubuntu?

Well with sudo that's kind of how it is anyway, is it not? Linux itself doesn't actually care. You can give your root account any password you want, same with your user accounts. If they have the same password then they have the same password...it's probably not the best idea from a security standpoint, of course.

well, i think i've read enough blogs, reviews and linuxsites for now. I decided to go ahead and download it, so that it's ready for a rainy day with me, left with nothing else to do.