I am a recent Ubuntu Jaunty to Debian Lenny convert and I’m enjoying Debian. I had some major problems with Ubuntu. There is one bug that has stayed from the earlier days of Intrepid(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1150108) and I still used Intrepid for 6 months and moved to Jaunty to find that the same problem persists. I still used Jaunty for about 3 months and realised that it was time.

Yes, in Debian, the softwares are old, but they haven’t caused any significant problems. However, I was facing small problems like glitchy audio playback but I have now muted the channels except for PCM, and it is fine. I’m unable to play everything with VLC coz it is 0.8.6, but Totem (with gstreamer) and SMPlayer (mplayer with w64codecs) do most playback I require. I’m planning to install Amarok (of course v1). Let me see how it goes. I’d like to install latest VLC coz I love it, but maybe it will take some time, compiling it and stuff. I’ve not had to compile a single package lately (since I moved to Ubuntu after having tried Mandriva, Fedora, OpenSuse and what not… thanks to ppa and synaptic\apt). I’m also having problems with MP4 with Totem (reportedly coz I’m missing H.264 decoder,MPEG-4 AAC decoder.. thanks to gnome-app-install for figuring that out.. but it could not install it unlike in Ubuntu.. and I haven’t yet found a workaround.. I use SMPlayer instead). Also, how do I load subtitles in Totem? I use SMPlayer for anything that requires subtitles. SMPlayer works great (unlike in Ubuntu, where its memory usage wud go up continuously unless there was no memory free.. and lot wud be swapped.. eventually causing mplayer backend to crash).

I gave LXDE a shot and it is really fast, responsive and consumes a lot less memory, but having used Gnome for so long (Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 9.04, with a little bit of KDE4 in between) and not much use of 2GB DDR2 800 RAM, I went back to Gnome.

I’m also having problems with Compiz-Fusion not being as smooth as it was in Ubuntu Jaunty so I have disabled it. I have Intel OnBoard GMA 3100 and Debian Lenny does not seem to have a good driver for it. I’ve also faced x-server shutdown (maybe I’m not explaining it properly) few times (3 to be exact) in 5-6 days of use but haven’t bothered to fix it since it has not bothered me much (maybe that will take a little bit of data\work loss to get me going.. “don’t fix it until it cuts you.. it was broken some time back..” is my way of doing things, unfortunately).

To give it a bit of Ubuntu feel since I’ve been acustomed to using it, I installed gdebi-gtk, from repos, which provides a graphical frontend for installing deb files, but it did not work (reportedly because of unsupported gksu option, maybe coz it is older version.. any ideas?).

The overall expereince is good enough though, coz I’m getting quick boot up and quick file operations (see forum discussion on the bug in Ubuntu) in Debian Lenny (maybe because of the old kernel used…). Also, iceweasel and adobe flash plugin are working better (in Ubuntu, some days, flash wud work and some days it wouldn’t). I’m still with the default version of Iceweasel (3.0.6) and haven’t thought of upgrading to FF 3.5 (since is is not easy as ppa and it isn’t broken anyways… damn Ubuntu made me so lazy).

Lets see how long Lenny interests me.

+ It is über fast with lxde!
+ Simple install from one CD.
- Needed to install alsa stuff, smb client (to print to windows PC’s printer, mc, xfe, the rest of openoffice.org, geany (this is no biggie to do)
- LXDE & Pcmanfm web documentation, wikis and forums are lacking a bit, for newbies anyway. I’ll do my part to fix this over time.

Like I said before, I do run Debian and enjoy it very much. Its’ fast and has tons of software apps in the repos so just install what you want and its’ your own customized distro.

Debian may not be a beginners distro like maybe Mepis or Ubuntu but if you like Linux, you’ll love Debian for its’ speed and stability.

Once again, nice review and thanks for the feedback.

Brad

I use Debian everyday as a desktop and a server and it never fails me. If you enable the extra repositories and the multimedia as well, you’ll find most of the aps you’re looking for.

The only thing that I’ve had trouble with is the Nvidia driver installation. I’ve tried both the “Debian way” and the “Nvidia way”, neither of which seem to work although the default driver gives me stunning graphics on my Planar flat panel monitor.

Perhaps it has something to do with the new kernel as I’ve noticed that Xorg does not show my nvidia driver but shows “configured video device” instead, even if I change it, it reverts back to this.

Mine uses the 71xx driver in legacy but when I try to install it, it says …71xx not found. I tried packages/Debian and also found that its’ unavailable in either stable, unstable or testing so I assume its’ just no longer available.

The Nvidia way is really neat once you figure out how to get it to run. Ie; /home/username/Desktop/Nvidia-Linux… It even tried to build a new kernel but it does edit the Xorg files nor does it explain how to do so very well.

Might also try the KDE version of Lenny. Even faster yet and has lots of tools in the system menu.

If anyone knows how to correctly install the video driver, please send me a message@:

satelliteman43@yahoo.com

So, I can post the instructions of my site.

Always interested in keeping up with all the latest Linux distributions.

If I had the time, I’d be a distro hopper too.

Thoroughly enjoyed the review. Readable, balanced with screenshots. I fully appreciate the time and effort that must have gone into that post so many thanks.

It must be kind of soul destroying to get pedants moaning about your grammar and the use of its’ versus ‘it’s’ ! FWIW I couldn’t see any occurances of it’s but there you go.

Your writing style, spelling and grammar is fine – this is a blog not Linux Journal.

Keep the reviews and Linux Outlaws podcasts coming and don’t let the grammar and language police grind you down.

Andy