Debian has so many choices and possibilities that you will feel light headed when customizing the system for your needs. Ubuntu has stripped many of these choices away and offered the best of Debian for a desktop user on a single CD.

I do not like sudo. I would rather just enter a root terminal and do my stuff there.

In my opinion, Ubuntu is no easier to install than Debian.

I've been running debian before and like the concept, liked apt, but since I was a new user I often found it hard to find solutions. I googled, read man pages and irc'd. It probably was there but wasn't written for me. I did get some help on irc channels but sometimes people thought I was just a moron who wouldn't read 10 man pages to solve the problem.

After somehow managing to crash debian to a state where I wasn't strong enough to fix (I had been meddling with things too hard for me). I switched to ubuntu.

It had everything I loved about debian, the apt, the power, etc. It also has a community that wants to help, gnome which imho is superior to kde and all kinds of things to make you happy.

First thing I noticed was that I wasn't required to set a root password which freaked me out, but with some help from the irc-channels I got around that too (been noticing several people reviewing that as a downside here) and I can su whenever I want, which is not that often I've realized after a few weeks with ubuntu.

If you're looking for an easy yet powerful dist, try ubuntu.

This review is for the 5.04 Hoary release.

I really like Ubuntu, and honestly, I found the problems that I ran into with it more fun than frustrating (but that could be my view on things).

The first computer I installed it on was my Compaq Presario 1510 laptop. It took me almost a week to figure out why the display would only show up off-center in 800x600 mode. Turns out, my laptop has an odd native resolution (1400x1050). After a week of fighting with drivers and settings, I finally loaded up a Knoppix Live-CD (at the recommendation of some of the guys on Ubuntuforums.org) and manually got the refresh rates for my screen, because apparently Ubuntu did not detect them correctly. After that, no problems since. The wireless card I bought for it was literally plug and play.

I really, really, really like apt-get. It makes installing new programs easy, and while I don't usually use the GUI (Synaptic) I'm very fond of apt.

I have since installed Ubuntu on a second hard drive in my desktop PC (P4 2.8, 512 MB RAM, Radeon X700). The boot loader didn't work, but that has more to do with the main HDD (Windows) being SATA-based and the second hard drive running from an IDE controller card. I simply have to change the boot options in the BIOS to choose between Linux and Windows... no problem.

Again, my major problem was display. The ATI driver included with Hoary does not work by default with the X700 PRO. I had to use the VESA driver to get X running in the first place, and then spent a goodly amount of time trying to get the FGLRX driver to function. Once I got it running, though, I get amazing framerates (close to 5000 FPS) in glxgears.

All in all, I definitely recommend Ubuntu. It's great for a learning experience. I've played with Redhat 7, FC2 and FC3, Mandrake 10, Debian, Knoppix, Mepis and a few others, but Ubuntu is definitely my favorite by far.

And if you need help figuring something out, ubuntuforums.org and linuxquestions.org are definitely the two best resources. :)

Hi,

I joined this forum to receive guidance for installing LFS but let me now say a few words about the distribution I am using i.e. Ubuntu 5.04.

It is an excellent distribution with great forum. I have only 128 MB RAM so I switched to XFCE desktop for fast loading. I find that applications too load a little faster on XFCE compared to Gnome.

kagashe

I've moved from RPM base (Fedora) to the new
cool distribution (Ubuntu).
At first I thinks it has only one disk distro. it may
lack of software that I need or even the most
important things like driver (VGA,LAN,SOUND).
And I 've got the terrible past with debian.
After I've installed.Oh GREAT (in thai language
ÊØ´ÂÍ´). I very like it at first met.

Ubuntu base on Debian but it is very difference.
It's for newbies to expert.Easy to update.Easy to manage.