I decided to abandon Ubuntu on my home desktop after the upgrade to 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I knew there were some things that I couldn’t like, but I didn’t know it would cripple the very base of the operating system. These are the things that went bad:
- The upgrade finished with obscure errors.
- can’t log in graphically without safe mode.
- system console (CTRL+ALT+F1 etc.) appears as a white background and unreadable characters.
- packages have been left in an unclean state.
I know some or all of these problems could have been caused by me:
- during the upgrade I answered some yes/no questions about packages configuration, picking arbitrarily what seemed to be the safest choice
- I had both ubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop installed
- I had some PPAs as apt sources.
- I had installed some non-canon packages such as Truecrypt.
- I am running LVM on top of RAID to complicate things
- I don’t do a clean reinstall since 3 years ago.
It’s just that maybe Ubuntu is not for my desktop. I like to tinker and hack my desktop, and at every upgrade there’s the possibility to break some of the “borderline” configurations that I am running. For what I do with my desktop, Ubuntu is user friendly for 6 months. For this reason I wanted to switch to a rolling release distribution. If things break, at least they break one at a time and they could leave me with a usable box with only one thing that broke.
The three rolling-release distributions that I considered were:
- Linux Mint Debian Edition (http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php)
- Arch Linux (http://www.archlinux.org/)
- Debian testing (http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/)
I heard nice things about Arch Linux, but at the moment I wanted something more familiar. LMDE seems promising, but most reviews show that it is still rough on the edges; I will keep an eye on it because it could one day become exactly what I need. Ultimately I chose Debian testing (wheezy), so that I could keep a familiar package environment and run a distribution that has a relatively large user base.
I am keeping Ubuntu installed and running on my laptop, because I don’t hack very much on that machine, which always ran with “predictable” settings and configurations, and up to now all the upgrades went smoothly. It is also the machine that I share with my mother so I want to keep a user friendly interface on it.
So far the Debian installation went OK, and after it completed the first thing that I added was etckeeper, to keep a log about my system configuration and have a way to roll back or debug when things break. I hope this will be the last clean install that I do on this machine for a long time.
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Freedom Embedded 
shuggie
2011/07/10
I see you’ve already made the switch so it’s probably too late but I switched recently from Linux Mint (which I’ve been on for about 4 years through 5 versions) to SuSE tumbleweed – which is their rolling distribution.
So far it’s very good.
In the past I’ve always done re-installs but I’m hoping that won’t be necessary in future.
Balau
2011/07/10
I didn’t know about Tumbleweed, but I think the same reasoning I did for Arch Linux could apply to this distro as well. Feel free to report any experience that you are having with your choice.
dimbulb1024
2011/07/10
I switched from Ubuntu to Linux Mint Debian about a year ago and have been really happy with. It was a bit rough to start with, but Clem and his team have been constantly polishing it up and have made some nice strides in the last few months.
Anon
2011/07/11
You could give Pinguy OS a try on your laptop.
Anon
2011/07/11
Just so you know, I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 (clean install) right now without any of the problems you mentioned, or for that matter, without any of the problems most of the “I’m leaving Ubuntu” people talk about.
I know it’s a different situation with your machine, as it was far from a clean install, but I’m just saying that for me, 11.04 has shown itself to be stable on a range of hardware, new and old.
If Unity itself isn’t what turns you away from Ubuntu, you might want to try a clean install of 11.04 on your laptop. As for the rest, from what you’ve said it sounds like a rolling release distro might suit you better indeed. My own Ubuntu installs usually turn into psuedo-rolling releases through lots of PPAs added in to handle any major applications that I want to keep current.
Carl Draper
2011/07/11
My main desktop runs Ubuntu 10.0.4, it’s LTS so no need to upgrade every six months, don’t have to upgrade it until it’s unsupported. I have two laptops running 11.0.4, one on Foresight Linux (very interesting distro, you can rollback every package install change), and two on Debian Squeeze. My other desktops and servers all run Ubuntu 10.0.4.
Fastgame
2011/07/11
PCLinuxOS is a rolling release.
milkline
2011/07/11
I’m an Archlinuxer, for about 2 years.
It’s really nice in aspect of updating.
however something is not so convinient as Fedora or Ubuntu, cause many software only supply the rpm or deb package.
For example, I want to do something with meego devolopment kit, but these are all rpm, and complicated to transfer to Arch package, as a fresher to linux.
except that, everything goes well. Arch is a great idea for any user.
Andrew
2011/07/11
MEPIS is debian-based, and definitely not ubuntu. You may have luck with such a distro. Especially considering that it can reuse old /home partitions and folders.
Chris
2011/07/11
Only good experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed over here. 🙂
Balau
2011/07/13
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I had to decide quickly because my desktop was not working and I needed it. I plan to try on virtual machines all the alternatives you gave me to have a feeling about each distro. For now I am settling on what I’m already familiar with.
geir s
2011/07/29
Try lmde if you like it, I do! In update manager you can switch to only get LTS-updates. Also, choosing that you didn’t have a rolling release anymore, but a steady debian system. If gnome is a little slow you can also try xfce, it looks like debian6
Luca Bruno
2011/07/31
I consider debian sid more stable as a desktop than testing.
Gunter
2011/07/31
I installed OpenSUSE 11.2 (SuSE user since 2000) when I bought this laptop and upgraded to 11.3,11.4 and now to Tumbleweed without ANY problems. Eat this Ubuntu!
It is time that the myth goes extinct that rpm is inferior to ‘apt’ which is comparing oranges to apples anyway since comparing rpm with ‘dpkg’ would be more fair.
Jon
2011/07/31
“system console (CTRL+ALT+F1 etc.) appears as a white background and unreadable characters.”
After upgrading to Natty on my old desktop, I have the same above problem from boot and my NVIDIA gfx driver won’t work. Did you manage to fix this? Has anyone?