I’d like to switch over to Debian distro. It’s a pain to have to switch over to a new LTS Ubuntu every 5 years and especially hate “improvements” such as Unity. And snce 16.04 has some weird issue with pulldown menus on my Emacs, I still am on 14.04. One year left.

Which the *nix old-schoolers do NOT like. (I empathize with them — there are good reasons to keep things as separate entities, each configured/controlled with a text-based config file.)

Canonical (Ubuntu) held out, even making their own superior tool, “upstart”, but they eventually knuckled under and adopted systemd, too. (Fedora led the way on systemd.) It was incorporated into Ubuntu in 15.04. Currently it’s implemented as sort of a hybrid with upstart and traditional init.d scripts, as we’re in a transition period for getting everything on the bandwagon of systemd.

I don’t like it… I don’t have the visibility and control at low levels that I used to. Even the logs are mostly “gone” now. It’s enough to keep me at 14.04 (for a while at least). ::sigh::

* Fedora/RHEL gather together and organize all the system control and management init & config files in pretty much one place (/etc/sysconfig) better than how Debian-based Linux does it.

* Debian-based Linux (incl. Ubuntu, et al) has a better, friendlier, more powerful set of admin tools, IMHO.

To me, the biggest difference is the package management system.

But installing Fedora involves the same basic process: A live DVD or USB installation, pick the defaults, etc.

Also, there may be more KDE-ites using Fedora than Linux, but I’m not sure.

Fedora runs Office applications and all the major browsers very well but by far the best effect of switching to Linux of any flavour is never again having to see or worry about malware and viruses which just steal your time at best, or wreck your business at worst.

However, viruses and worms do exist for Linux, but are very rare and users are unlikely to encounter them as long as they keep their passwords secure and unguessable and use sftp instead of ftp to avoid exposing them to the web.

Some of the reasons involve Canonical being a world-wide distributor of Ubuntu, and subject to licensing issues regarding some of these “extras”. YOU can install them perhaps, but Canonical can’t put them on their DVD image to help you by installing them by default.

The biggest class of these “extras” is probably multimedia additions, such as codecs. There are many classes of such “restricted” add-ons, however.

This is handled by enabling additional software repositories (disabled by default in the “Test Drive” DVD boot), then running software install apps to install them yourself. (The Ubuntu Software Center has issues in 16.04, but you can install “Synaptic” to use as an alternate.)

The best thing to do is to Google “things to do after you install ubuntu” to get pages such as this one from Greg, as well as others (such as webupd8.org) that will suggest the most common useful add-ons and walk you through the process of installing them.

Without this, unfortunately, someone’s first-time experience with Ubuntu may be less than stellar, with them drawing an incorrect conclusion that Ubuntu doesn’t measure up — when it certainly does!

(I have a set of scripts that selects and installs a variety of my favorite add-ons of various types from various sources. It makes “installation phase 2” go quickly and painlessly… When done, my system not only rivals Windows, it surpasses Windows. …Which I run in VirtualBox as a VM, courtesy of one of my scripts.)