See alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ, question 3.1.

That's why they've got backports

Me, I'm running the Testing (Squeeze) version of Debian. It actually feels more stable than Ubuntu 10.04, despite the fact that it still has the "testing" sticker on it.

Though even backports are reasonably tightly tied to the release cycle (both for Debian and Ubuntu) which has implications to be aware of.

A few months back I was doing some a-b comparisons with Debian 5 and Ubuntu 8.04 and I tried to grok the Debian backports and for some reason found them more confusing than Ubuntu's. For me backports were important for a few key packages (like PostgreSQL) that I want to stay current with.

Maybe it was how backports pulling from further up the tree (testing and/or even unstable) interacted with the Debian release cycle, and could thus get in the way of a later upgrade the longer you used them after a release had occurred. I seemed to have a harder time quantifying the potential impacts of having backports in use during the transition of a new stable release.

For example, the warning on backports.org about continuing to use etch-backports after lenny's release carrying a risk of preventing an eventual upgrade to lenny. And presumably that risk is introduced the day of a new stable release, so there's a hard window of time to make some decisions once a new stable is coming out, even if there's no immediate intention to upgrade to the new stable.

Backports availability generally matches the release cycle, and the "release when ready" policy of Debian isn't necessarily a positive in terms of backports and ongoing support. For example, etch-backports stopped accepting submissions/updates this past January, just a year after lenny's first release. If you installed etch on your server in 2009, you had a very short lifecycle. Backports for Ubuntu 8.04 is still active (and presumably will be through the end of the LTS support, which is still a few years out for server), and the LTS to LTS upgrade path should remain intact.

Not to say one is necessarily better than the other, but Ubuntu LTS does give you a bit more runway and predictable overlap, all while backports continues to be supported. I find Debian Stable vs. Ubuntu LTS stability debatable in the server space (personally I don't see much difference), but from an administration perspective, maybe I'm just getting old, but I find predictable timing for release and support cycles has a lot going for it. Even if I assume I'll always wait a year into a new 5-year LTS release before considering it, that's still predictable.

Of course, in the context of Linode some of the upgrade stuff may be less critical, as it's certainly plausible to just always start afresh with a new distribution image and move over your applications, than necessarily try to do an in-place upgrade, if the latter is likely to cause any issues.

-- David

The danger of ubuntu's backports (and I presume Debians) are that unless you pin the repo, it'll update everything you have installed to whatever is in backports. Of course, with pinning, you can ensure that you get only the package you want and any dependencies.

The alternative is to use PPAs, which are essentially miniature repositories maintained by Ubuntu users, usually for specific packages or small groups of packages, some potential dependencies, built against various versions of Ubuntu. This can also be useful for packages that aren't in the main Ubuntu repositories at all.

When I was using Ubuntu as my desktop OS, I used the smplayer PPA to get a recent version of smplayer, since the version in the Ubuntu repositories was extremely old.

Absolutely, and that was something I wish was clearer when I first started with backports, but it took me one system of seeing any backport come in to figure it out. Now, whenever I enable the backports repository on a system, I immediately create a preferences file that assigns 200 to anything in that repository (anything below 500 will do). So nothing happens by default. And yes, the same works with Debian.

When I want a backport, I just specify the backports repository to the install command at which point the level gets a bump that then exceeds the main repositories.

An alternative is to use preferences to prevent backports from ever being installable, but then if you try to cherry pick packages, you end up having to specify any backported dependencies individually. Also, by having a level set, just below the regular repository, once you do install a backport, it'll be maintained if the backport package is updated.


Yep, I've used several packages from them. Though one risk I find with the private PPAs is that you have no control over how long they exist. One that I was using (a current version of nginx for 8.04) just disappeared one day when the developer apparently moved on to later releases and retired his support for 8.04. Of course, that didn't negate the installation I had, but if or when I want to upgrade, it'll be back to a locally built version.

-- David

Why do you not run it on your desktop now?

I use ubuntu server over debian for more up-to-date package versions.

I'm not running some sort of nasa mission critical system, it's just my box to play with.

And ufw rocks https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UncomplicatedFirewall

It suited my purposes fine for a year or two, but I wasn't doing much gaming. When I got a new computer and built a pretty powerful rig, I wanted to get back to doing more gaming. I also did some fansubbing for a while.

In terms of gaming, gaming on Linux is a joke, no matter what anybody tells you. Barely any games have native ports, those that do take extra effort to get running (getting UT2K4 running involved messing around with replacing sound libraries), WINE makes some games decently playable but can require hours of tweaking to get each game running, and they never run as well as on Windows...

Fansubbing is really tough on Linux, partially because libass is (or was, at the time), very inaccurate in terms of rendering subtitles, and a lot of the tools used just don't exist on Linux.

These days, I'm not fansubbing actively anymore, and I could just dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows for when I want to play games, but it's annoying to be rebooting all the time (I always had a Windows partition even when I ran Ubuntu), and Windows was so much better than Vista that it was just easier to stick to the one OS that did most of what I wanted rather than switching back and forth between two OSes, neither of which fit my needs entirely.

After all, I still maintain a variety of Linux servers and VPSes off-site, and my file server in my apartment runs OpenSolaris (for ZFS). And my laptop does still have a seldom used Ubuntu partition... So on the off chance that I need to do something on Linux or Unix, I certainly have more than enough places to do so.

All of the VPS and servers run Ubuntu, except for the fileserver. I'd run Ubuntu there too if ZFS didn't require FUSE... I could have gone with Nexenta to get the Ubuntu userland, but my worry there was that the kernel and drivers wouldn't be as recent as OpenSolaris.