New laptop time

[Tom]

I am surprised you didn't go Ubuntu on the laptop. They have decent decent WiFi tools and I have found its repo to be WAY more current than Debian even when using older LTS releases.

Ubuntu likes to break, and force crazy changes when ever the mood hits them. Heck, they are thinking about developing their own display server to replace X now. It's just.. ughgh.

I use Debian Sid though, which is generally more up to date than Ubuntu, since Ubuntu is branched off of Debian Sid every 6 months. Ubuntu is a combination of the worst aspects of Debian Stable, and Debian Sid. You get untimely updates (every 6 months), and things can be rather unstable.

[Lazybones]

Odd since I found common apps like transmission be more current, and completely up to date if you used PPA repos which many projects seem to be supporting for Ubuntu .

Sticking to Ubuntu LTS over cutting edge seems to be both stable and allows you to have current apps.

[Tom]

Odd since I found common apps like transmission be more current, and completely up to date if you used PPA repos which many projects seem to be supporting for Ubuntu .

Sticking to Ubuntu LTS over cutting edge seems to be both stable and allows you to have current apps.

Except PPAs aren't part of the distro. It'd be like me pulling out of random repos, just hoping it'll work and not break anything. Compare a stock Ubuntu distro to a stock Sid.

I'm really not a fan of the direction Ubuntu is heading. And last I ran it, I had to switch mere months after I installed it because it was broken and out dated.

[Lazybones]

Odd since I found common apps like transmission be more current, and completely up to date if you used PPA repos which many projects seem to be supporting for Ubuntu .

Sticking to Ubuntu LTS over cutting edge seems to be both stable and allows you to have current apps.

Except PPAs aren't part of the distro. It'd be like me pulling out of random repos, just hoping it'll work and not break anything. Compare a stock Ubuntu distro to a stock Sid.

I'm really not a fan of the direction Ubuntu is heading. And last I ran it, I had to switch mere months after I installed it because it was broken and out dated.

Fair enough if you don't like it, the PPA repo's seem to use the same package management protections so if there is no build for your release by default it should not install as far as I understand it. Also if you are on LTS your chances of compatibility seem to be the greatest.

transmission-daemon

Debian Repo	Ubuntu Repo	Ubuntu Direct PPA	Official released source
squeeze (stable) 2.03	The Precise Pangolin (supported) 2.51	2.76	2.76
wheezy (testing) 2.52	The Quantal Quetzal (current stable release) 2.61	2.76	2.76
sid (unstable) 2.52	The Raring Ringtail (active development) 2.76	2.76	2.76

ZNC

Debian Repo	Ubuntu Repo	Ubuntu Backports	Official released source
squeeze (stable) 0.092	The Precise Pangolin (supported) 0.206	1.0	1.0
wheezy (testing) 0.206	The Quantal Quetzal (current stable release) 0.206	1.0	1.0
sid (unstable) 0.206	The Raring Ringtail (active development) 1.0	1.0	1.0

libreoffice

Debian Repo	Ubuntu Repo	Official released source / installer
squeeze (stable) 1:3.5.4	The Precise Pangolin (supported) 1:3.5.4	4.0
wheezy (testing) 1:3.5.4	The Quantal Quetzal (current stable release) 1:3.6.2	4.0
sid (unstable) 1:3.5.4	The Raring Ringtail (active development) 1:3.6.2	4.0

As far as I have seen the Ubuntu STABLE release repo is always more up to date than SID and the LTS long term support OLD release of ubuntu is about on par with SID but can be more up to date with a  PPA repo.

Plex runs an official PPA for Ubuntu which is really handy... there is someone in the forums that runs an unofficial Debia Repo that is at least a week or two behind the official releases as he fixes the start-up scripts.

[Tom]

That's not what I found. I'd have to wait months and months for the next ubuntu release to get a newer Xorg or KDE or something like that. Where as sid/experimental would at least get the X stuff sooner. Can't talk about KDE though, debian's kde is way behind. But its stable.

I've found debian does a pretty good job of that. Things don't often break. And it seems to me that they don't upgrade willy-nilly to new versions just because they are there. Usually they don't because there's some issue with them. Like with the kde-pim packages. New kmail in there that ate a bunch of my mail settings and was generally crap at the time. And they still haven't updated to kmail2 yet. And its been quite a while since kmail2 was officially released.

That said, I do hear of (big) breakages in Ubuntu fairly regularly.

I've started to care a lot more about my system being stable, so I don't have to fight with brokenness. I still like to have non-ancient packages, but its not as important as it once was to have the newest and shiniest versions.