Debian as a desktop system-A good alternative to Ubuntu

By Yousef Ourabi
Online on: recently published
Debian is well respected as a stable server distribution, and most of the reviews focus on aspects appropriate to server deployments. This article covers Debian on the desktop. It is not a step by step tutorial, but focuses on the highlights of the recent Etch release.
An important difference between Debian Etch and its previous releases is its ease of use as a desktop operating system. Ubuntu has been in the limelight recently, but it’s important to remember that Ubuntu is based on Debian, and every once in a while it’s important to return to a project’s roots. Debian was the first distribution to have a social contract with its users and its full name is Debian GNU/Linux, a sign of respect and acknowledgment towards the GNU foundation.
I’ve been running Etch on my laptop very successfully and I’m happy to report that previous pain points, such as wireless networking, “just work” on my Dell laptop. In addition to this new polish, a graphical installer and support for the AMD64 architecture are both new to Debian Etch. Also included are many favorite free software Java packages such as Ant and Tomcat into the main package repositories.
Debian has the perception of being a “geek” distribution, but I would make the opposite argument. It is in fact inclusive, taking great pride in the number of hardware architectures it supports.

Debian GNU/Linux was the first distribution to include a social contract
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Etch contains reasonably up to date core packages. Here are some of the more notable ones:

• Xorg 7
• GNOME 2.14 with bits from 2.16
• IceWeasel 2.x and IceDove 1.x
• OpenOffice.org 2

Iceweasel is Firefox Iceweasel is a re-branded Mozilla Firefox browser. This was done by Debian in order to comply with a demand from the Mozilla foundation that they either drop the Firefox name and media (icons, etc.) or comply with policies Debian found unacceptable.

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