bitvector wrote:I wouldn't lump Debian in with Fedora and Gentoo for the level of foibles. Sure, Debian doesn't have a slick GUI+live system installer and brown themes with naked people singing kumbaya, but it certainly has a high level of care applied to packaging and system evolution.
I should have been clearer about what I meant. I agree Debian's "foibles" are different.
Fedora and Ubuntu both suffer at times from being too bleeding edge. Broken stuff makes it into the official releases on a semi-regular basis.
Debian (provided that you stick with the "stable" branch) doesn't suffer from "bleeding edge brokenness" syndrome. It can, however, be somewhat daunting for people who are still relatively new to Linux; it seems to be aimed more at the Linux "power user" who is willing to dive into the deep end and really understand what's going on under the hood. Because of its conservative approach, it also lags other distros quite a bit on features; for a desktop, you may actually
want some of the more bleeding edge features, even if they are not as stable.
Fedora and Gentoo explicitly try to stay at the bleeding edge of everything, so you experience a lot more breakage and hiccups. And along that dimension, I'd argue Ubuntu pushes the envelope more than Debian testing/unstable (e.g. 3D desktop effects by default, NetworkManager without static IPs, PulseAudio, GRUB2 without support for booting Windows, etc.).
Yes, NetworkManager pisses me off. It amazes me that Ubuntu has managed to go through two release cycles and it is
still half-broken; at least it sort of works now in 9.04 (but it is still busted to the point that you're probably better off ripping it out and manually editing the network configuration if you need a static IP).
I don't know what you're referring to regarding the Windows boot support though. I just set up a Windows / Ubuntu 9.04 dual-boot system the other day, and it seemed to work fine.