# Comments on Dapper Drake

There is a [not-so-nice review of Dapper Drake][1], Ubuntu's [new
release][2], over at Tectonic. A few comments - I'm typing this on
my laptop running Dapper as we speak, and it has been pretty stable
for me, once I got it installed. One complaint I did share was the
mysterious removal of some packages during my dist-upgrade from
Breezy, like Evolution, Openoffice.org and Gaim. It wasn't that big
of a deal, I just re-installed any missing packages afterwards, but
it was still rather odd.

I also did try to upgrade using the live CD, but found the installer
horribly slow and the partitioning tool almost unusable - I actually
rebooted into my old system to do the command-line dist-upgrade,
which worked with a few missing packages. While the live-CD
installer is a nice feature, I much prefer something like Debian's
text-based installer, which is much more responsive. Text-based
installers are underrated. I do share some of their concerns about
stability:

> The first mistake, I think, was its desire to be a bleeding edge
> distribution, rather than a leading edge distro. Basing itself on
> Etch, Debian's unstable release, could be a problem. When the
> early versions of Ubuntu used the then-unstable Sarge as their
> foundations, it wasn't a risk -- Sarge was on the cusp of being
> released. Etch, on the other hand, is brand-new, and far from
> getting a thumbs-up as a stable distribution.

I think it's important to specify desktop vs. server here, I see a
lot of reviews that make assumptions about how a system is being
used. Debian Etch makes a fine desktop, even without the Ubuntu
touch.

I do wonder how Canonical can keep their server and desktop variants
in synch with one another, however - the two have different
goals. Desktop users tend to value applications and bleeding-edge
hardware support, while server admins value stability. It's
difficult to reconcile the two under the same codebase. Debian has
been dealing with this issue for years ('Stable' is out of date,
etc.), and has dealt with it pretty decently, I think (you run
Debian testing or unstable if you want an up-to-date desktop).

It seems difficult, if not impossible, to produce a well-tested and
stable server distribution if key components of it like the
compiler, kernel and C library are less than six months old. I've
always thought of Ubuntu as a polished Debian meant for desktops,
anyway, and reserve Debian stable for production servers. In the
end, Ubuntu is still a rather new distribution, and I think it still
remains to be seen if they can break into the enterprise server
space in a meaningful way.

## Comments

**[Marc](#16 "2006-06-13 05:36:00"):** Interesting point. Ubuntu has
historically been geared towards the desktop so that's probably it's
strength. I've certainly used it more as a desktop OS than a server
OS, since I have web hosting (which incidentally, uses
Debian). - Marc

**[Anonymous](#17 "2006-06-22 04:18:00"):** Have upgraded to Dapper
on 4 systems now, and although I had some issues with every upgrade
(conflicting packages), I have got everything working stably on each
machine (all x86 though).The loss of some of the desktop programs
during the update was due to a conflict between the old
ubuntu-desktop package and one of the new libraries. This caused a
point where an 'apt-get -f install' was needed, which removed
ubuntu-desktop in order to repair the issue. As ubuntu-desktop was
responsible for the install of packages like open-office, this
caused them to be removed as well.To resolve, just 'apt-get install
ubuntu-desktop' again after the upgrade, and all the missing
programs return :)

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20061230183510/http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?src=rss&id=1026
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20061227172126/http://www.ubuntu.com/news/606released
.