When you get the hang of Debian again, why not make an experiment, with Sid/Experimental?

That way you get maybe a little more bugs, more like the level of Ubungu/Kubungu. As that is very low it won't make a practical difference.

However, it would bring you KDE 4.2 and OpenOffice 3.0.x.

I use Ubuntu and Lenny. I like them both for different reasons. I would have tried Fedora, because it's supposed to really rock, but I decided to stick with Debian distributions for now (i.e. no Red Hat). Anyway, I think that there are different reasons for preferring different distributions of Debian. If you want pure FOSS, Gobuntu is a possibility. If Xubuntu is not fast enough for you on a low resource box, a net-install of Debian with Xfce might be better. If you want little fuss with getting your hardware to work, Mint is probably for you. So there are all sorts of possibilities. However, if you want to support a community effort to eventually overcome MS' dominance as having the most popular operating system/s for the general public, supporting Canonical is the way to go. I don't think that Debian has a chance because it's too geeky. So if you really want to support FOSS, go back to using a 'buntu distro.

People don't seem to get the fact that Debian users can pick and choose particular packages (and their dependencies of course) from the Unstable (Sid) or Experimental repositories without upgrading their entire system against those repositories! For example, if one wanted the latest OpenOffice or Iceweasel or Pidgin, Gimp, etc., one would simply enable the Unstable and/or Experimental repos, issue the usual apt-get update and then use Synaptic to pick just those packages. Disable the repositories afterwards and re-issue the apt-get update command to return to life in stable Lenny. Viola! No harm, no foul. It's those folks who get greedy and start to upgrade myriad packages and libraries from the Unstable or Experimental repos who eventually hose their systems. While it's true that it's frowned upon by the Debian community to run a so called "mixed" system, who cares? It's your computer, do what you want. I've been dipping into the Unstable / Experimental repos in Debian for years without hosing my system. Just be careful and use a little common sense and it will turn out fine. All that being said, I've also been a huge fan of Sidux! Finally, Mepis is a fantastic Debian Lenny based system that also hosts its own third party repo that contains many updated packages like those mentioned above.

You don't even have to forgo the NVIDIA binary drivers. They're in the non-free repos
http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=lenny&keywords=nvidia

Zenwalk is very simple and faaaaaaassssttt! Give it a try.

Whenever Debian stable is released, there seems to be a lot of interest in it, and you have people coming out of the woodwork to get back to it. I did it with Etch.

But within 12 months, I get sick of running antique versions of my apps and games, knowing that it will be six months to a year before the next stable will get released (having spent heaven-knows-how-long in freeze). Before you know it I'm trading in that sweet stability for the bleeding edge yet again. That's what I call the 'buntu blues.

Now I got Intrepid with half a dozen ppa repos added so I can have my desktop enviro's rc candidates and whatnot. It crashes and farts out daily, but it's hot'n'fresh. Well, that's the choice, isn't it?

I too moved to Kubuntu after reading about how great it was and how easy the nVidia driver installations would be. But driver or not, setting up TwinView was still a hassle, and I don't game on my computer. Once I decided that the drivers weren't worth the headache of the constant Kubuntu-fails-to-dist-upgrade and I was reinstalling every 6months, I decided to go back to Debian.

What can I say, I love it. Alan at http://www.linuxtoday.com/#comment-8169 try Debian with the Testing or perhaps Sid branch to get constantly new and stable packages. Currently, due to the freeze for Lenny, I even have KDE 4.2 from Experimental and it's incredibly stable, with the rest of my system at Sid (from before Lenny was released — I am holding off on upgrades to Sid at this point!)

I only use the default repos (including the 'main contrib non-free' parts) and the single Debian Multimedia repository, and I have access to every app that want. Overall, I have been most pleased with my Debian experiences and I cannot imagine working on the limited KDE that they use in Kubuntu, nor in any other distro. Plus, to work in *buntu seems that every improvement is coded for Gnome, and maybe tacked onto Kubuntu in a few releases later. No thank you. Debian I love you! :)

Debian is "the One"

sidux is "the nec plus ultra One".

All the benefits of Debian in a rock solid sid implementation. And the sidux community is great.

Hello,
One can use a useful debian lenny sources.list for the desktop like the listed at
http://www.techforce.com.br/index.php/news/linux_blog/sources_list_debian_lenny
You can have even nVidia 3D binary drivers packaged at the non-free section of repository.
Beware of installing and using nvidia-xconfig as it will overwrite unreliably your xorg.conf. It is better to start with the default packages nvidia-glx nvidia-settings nvidia-kernel-common.
There are even overclocking packages at repository.
Also, you could read the commands (the following page is also written in portuguese, but it is by far the most complete debian lenny desktop review till this date)
http://www.guiadohardware.net/dicas/debian-lenny-desktop.html
Regards.
Andre Felipe

My preference for the longest time was to run Debian. I almost never had a problem with Etch, but since Lenny ran so much better on my laptops, I began running it in mid-2008. Even at that comparatively early stage, it ran well, but on the road to stable, more than a few things broke, and for not one but two laptops I ran (Gateway Solo 1450, Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101) I had artifact problems with the display that I couldn't clear up.

I didn't have those problems in Ubuntu Hardy, so that's what I switched to.

Yes, Debian tends to run faster than both Ubuntu and Fedora, and with my old hardware, a little extra speed is a very good thing

And yes, I really appreciate the depth of the Debian repositories.

Maybe I'll try Lenny again now that it's stable. I would've stuck with Etch the whole time, except that at first Lenny was so good.

I'd like to think that the display issues I had been having have been fixed. That's always a problem when a small subset of hardware has a problem that the majority doesn't have. It can fall off the radar. In this case, I never knew which package to file the bug against.

Now that Debian has improved its live CDs, I should burn a new Lenny disc and give it a try.

Carla, you mention the many architectures that Debian supports. On my G4/466, the PowerPC version of Etch has been flawless. But for 32-bit Sparc, which I'd really love to run, the installer hangs in Etch and won't even begin to boot in Lenny on my Sparcstation 20. So that port is not exactly alive and well.

That said, I recognize that it's all about i386/x86_64 when it comes to desktops.

A trouble-free Debian desktop install remains a beautiful thing, to be sure.

I noticed you mentioned the various BSDs. I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 as a desktop system on this Toshiba laptop for quite a few months now. At first, I couldn't get almost any CDs to boot on this flaky optical drive, so the floppy install image of OpenBSD got this headed-for-the-trash laptop up and running. Since then I've learned that the touchy optical drive likes discs burned on some computers better than others, so I can theoretically run anything I want.

I sort of miss some of things that are easier in Linux. Flash video and Java are doable in OpenBSD, just not easy. And I really need a video-editing solution; Linux isn't exactly awash in advanced video-editing software, and OpenBSD is in even worse shape.

The development/update process in OpenBSD is quite a bit different than it is in most Linux distros. Another thing to get used to.

Not having easy access to ntfs filesystems isn't all that convenient, as is having OpenBSD's filesystem seemingly inaccessible from Linux.

OpenBSD is quite stable, though.

It's been a fun system to run. I suppose one of the things that got me into it was that it was something "different," and it fit my needs at the time.

Upgrading from etch to lenny has brought me issues. All was apparently fine after the upgrade, but days latter, and suddenly, and without any warnings, i lost the sound in KDE. I also started checking the log files. Aagh! the mail is possibly broken. Well, the mail can go down the toilet but i need sound. Nevermind, I go to the other side of the world, Gnome. There, there is sound. Wait. Nope. No sound through iceweasel. videos are silent, like at the beginning of the XX century. welcome back to the past. What else? oh yeah, that misterious gij and a bunch of java related packages. it says, package something is not configured yet. Well, how and where to configure that package. But why? I didnt have that issue in etch! Is lenny not well cooked after all? I may be able to solve all these problems, but I must insist: upgrading to a new version is still like playing Russian roulette (Russkaya ruletka). Voila, I suggest instead of using :

#aptitude full-upgrade

use instead:

#aptitude russian-roulette

what are your chances? ;)