I gave up on Ubuntu last weekend. A few years back I switched my servers from FreeBSD to Ubuntu. FreeBSD was taking a bit too long to administer and I wanted to spend that time elsewhere. Ubuntu seemed like a good choice; installing and updating packages was simple, and the Debian-style Apache configuration was similar to how I usually set up Apache on FreeBSD, so initial configuration was quick. The minimal administration effort came at a cost though.
The main problem I was having came down to the Ubuntu philosophy being slightly counter to my usage. It generally takes a while for a package on Ubuntu to be updated to the latest version. In this most recent case, PHP was still at 5.2 and I needed 5.3. So my usually easy-to-update Ubuntu installation became a headache. It's not like I needed bleeding edge updates. I simply wanted to take advantage of some of the new language features available in 5.3. I encountered some resistance building PHP from source and was ultimately wasting time I could have been coding.
After doing some research, it seemed that Debian was probably aligned more with how I was using my servers these days. I found there was a site that maintains the latest PHP packages for Debian and decided that I'd make the switch. It didn't involve learning anything new (same package management for instance) and I was able to get the whole machine switched over in an hour or two. It was made even easier thanks to running a VPS and being able to swap IP addresses between server instances in the same datacenter.
I still really like what they're doing with Ubuntu, but this wasn't the first time I had a problem similar to the above. The bottom line is my time is more valuable than that. I decided it was more efficient to remove the thing that had caused me the most problems historically. I'm a programmer, not a server administrator (although I do like to play one sometimes); so my time is better spent writing code rather than chasing obscure error messages across the Internet.
I'm not really going anywhere with this post. This is kind of like making a big deal about moving across the street. In reality nothing has really changed except some superficial things that only matter to me. And yes, not much has really happened recently :)
Leave a comment