Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t quite get the point of “big deal” versioning and upgrading with something like Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu on my laptop and one of my desktops. I like it on my laptop, because I rarely have to spend time configuring anything. I use it on my desktop, because it is an AMD-64 machine, I like Debian, and Ubuntu has better support for AMD-64. There are some things that Ubuntu does pretty well. For core packages, Ubuntu’s packages tend to be more up to date, and there is less stupidity. As far as the actual distribution, it is pretty nice.
What I find annoying about Ubuntu is the community around it. Mostly as a result of StumbleUpon, I come across all sorts of blog posts that show you how to make your Ubuntu totally awesome by installing a few standard and obvious packages. Worse are the Ubuntu forums, which always seem like a clusterfuck of stupidity from the linux world. Maybe I am being harsh; I remember posting some fairly obvious questions to Linux Questions when I was first using Linux in high school. Still, it is just the feel I get whenever I come across a post.
As I mentioned, one of the features of Ubuntu that really annoys me is the emphasis on versioning. Each one has some clever name, and each one is made into a big deal on the internets. There was an upgrade made available recently, which I have installed. I could see that it was putting aptitude through a gauntlet, but I don’t quite see what was changed. Some packages were made standard, and some were taken out. You are always given an “option” if you want to remove all the packages that are no longer supported or not, but aptitude never stops giving you crap afterwords until you do. Last time I upgraded, I discovered that I no longer want to use xmms. Actually, I started using audacious, and I have been happy with it. Anyway, it seems like they just reinstall most packages for some reason. I know Ubuntu does some stuff to a few packages to get them to work better together. There were also some new utilities, but still, it all seemed like something that could be done by aptitude normally. I just don’t get the big deal made over it…