The “buzz” around Ubuntu, and the occasional well-intentioned but uninformed supporter, were commonplace long before Canonical undertook any substantial marketing activity (other than the free distribution of the product itself). They are the consequence of community reactions to Ubuntu itself, which have built momentum through word of mouth.

Having written at length on the subject of bug reports on Ubuntu, I won’t reiterate the facts here. I do, however, explicitly reject your attribution of ignorance to the people working in this area of the project. It has no substance or basis in fact.

I’m truly sorry that the MidiSport package regressed, and glad that you’ve found a solution to your problem by using Debian. There are other users for whom Ubuntu works better, who don’t require this peripheral functionality, and it’s certainly no reason to denigrate them for making a different choice.

Ubuntu doesn’t “rebrand” Debian any more than Debian “rebrands” Linux. Choosing either of them promotes the cause of free software by showing that it is a good solution for most users. This diversity is a strength of the free software ecosystem.

Your attacks on Ubuntu are emotional but not logical or even correct. You don’t like Ubuntu because it gets all the publicity and you think it unfair. Debian makes it difficult to use new gear as it is always two kernels behind. Even running testing does not help much. So to get that new TV stick or whatever to work you have to run Unstable or use a kernel from experimental. That is fine if all you ever do on a computer is spend time keeping it running and you know what you are doing. If you just want to use your computer to get things done it quickly becomes tedious. Ubuntu is Debian Sid and Experimental made up to date and stable. As for bug reports, I have made many to Ubuntu devs and every one has been replied to, I got emailed updates and advice of final fixes.
Lastly, the vast majority of Ubuntu users do know it is based on Debian. A lot of Ubuntu users are former Debian users who do not see the problems you do. A few noobs might not, but that is because they are just starting out with Linux.

It’s not the “package systems”. Ubuntu uses Debian’s apt anyway. Ubuntu doesn’t have its own package manager. As usual, Canonical just takes Debian stuff, and rebrands it as its own.

It’s the repositories. Ubuntu devs make changes to Debian unstable that break software in the Debian repositories, and it’s obvious that Canonical doesn’t test all that software with the changes to Ubuntu, even though that software is listed when you run Synaptic under Ubuntu. (Canonical lacks the amount of skilled manpower that Debian has, and always will, because everything about Ubuntu, from its CoC to its target audience, is geared for ex-Windows Linux newbies who want to become gushing, unpaid Canonical salesmen, aka “Ubuntu fanbios”. These are not people who fix broken packages).

After all, I cited an example of a package listed in Synaptic (running under Ubuntu) which works in Debian Unstable, but not in Ubuntu. (Why mdz is _still_ asking for a specific example below, as if he’s pretending that no such thing exists, is beyond me. Apparently, as is the case with Ubuntu bug reports, the attitude is “If I pretend it doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t exist”).

The _real_ problem Ubuntu has is that Ubuntu is the most undeservedly overhyped Linux distro ever, and does _not_ offer anything more than many other distros out there (not just Debian). When it comes to its marketing hype, it’s the Microsoft Windows of the Linux distros. And that fact flies in the face of every attempt to portray Ubuntu as somehow being something more than the sum of the parts that it “borrows” from. It isn’t. Knowledgeable people (ie, _not_ the vast majority of Ubuntu users, who don’t even know that Ubuntu is based upon another distro, even while they’re trying to sell it to everyone on the planet) know this.

Welcome to reality, Canonical marketing dept.

I am now using 64bit Jaunty alpha5 plus updates and as of today it is working pretty well, 64 bit java, 64 bit flash, 64bit everything.

Ubuntu has always been stable for me, SID has always needed work. I could have used Debian Stable, but then my TV stick and GPS dongle would not work as the kernel was too far behind. The latest release is a step forward, but still a step behind. I have the knowledge to update Debian to a newer kernel,but I choose to use Ubuntu to save the mucking about.

Ubuntu serves a purpose that Debian has not been able to, that is make an up to date version of Debian that an average user can run with.

It’s also true that Kubuntu is a less active project than Ubuntu, though it benefits from much of the work done in the core platform. It may not be the best KDE distribution for you, but many people do use and enjoy it. It’s your choice.

As for acknowledging Debian, this article itself is a good example of that. The words “based on Debian” may not appear on the home page itself, but there’s an entire page devoted to explaining the heritage and the value Debian provides at http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian .

If you run LTS but want newer versions of some applications, there’s a community team which provides backports. These are not complete, but tend to cover a good variety of the popular packages which users might want. Our model here is actually very similar to Debian, which also produces full releases of all of the software at once.

As for merging back, can you point to another distribution where it’s easier to merge patches into Debian? The fact that Ubuntu is routinely merged with up-to-date Debian unstable actually makes it easier for the developers involved to exchange patches, because they’re working from a similar code base. Contrast this with some earlier Debian derivatives whose patches (if they were submitted at all) needed to be forward-ported across years of development before they could be merged. This was much, much worse.