I’ve just finished a rather-risky upgrade from Ubuntu Edgy to Debian Testing (without reinstalling). Why? Because I no longer trust Mark Shuttleworth to keep his commitment to Free Software, as I see the Freedom in Ubuntu being eroded with each passing day. What with the forthcoming inclusion of binary drivers in the next release and the recent announcement of collaboration with Linspire (a company who are out to make money, no matter what the cost to the FLOSS community who they have exploited from day one), I just don’t buy it any more. It’s clear what Linspire get from the deal – a bunch of people to sell proprietary software to and some free press to drag them from irrelevance – but not what Ubuntu get out of it; it can only be £££.
What is also annoying me is the way that Ubuntu people (i.e. Canonical employees) are increasingly dismissing those who believe in Free Software as a minority group of zealots who should be ignored, as this is a convenient way for them to avoid answering the issues we raise. They’d better realise sooner or later that it’s many of these people who are writing the software they’re distributing…
Debian has the Debian Social Contract and I trust them to abide by it, so that’s why I have switched back to Debian. I decided against gNewSense simply because they’re based on the previous version of Ubuntu and I like to be on or close to the cutting edge.
For anyone else considering switching from Ubuntu to Debian without reinstalling: don’t. Just reinstall.
If you really, really want to do it, you’d better be experienced at manually resolving package conflicts and not afraid to use the potentially-hideously-dangerous ‘–force-depends’ and ‘–force-remove-essential’ dpkg command line arguments together. If you are, then it’s a simple case of swapping your sources.list for a Debian one and running ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ and fixing the dependency problems as they arise…
