So a week ago I was able to install Hoary Hedgehog. What can I say? The install was simple, and it worked. Kubuntu worked as well. I had been itching to install debian for a while to try it out, yet as I'm a more bleeding edge type of guy, I knew I wouldn't want to use stable (yeah I know testing and experimental). (I was impressed with Ubuntu, but will be sticking with Gentoo for the moment.)
So there was a recent interview with Debian Guru Ian Murdock. Here's an interesting snippet: "If anything, Ubuntu's popularity is a net negative for Debian," Murdoch told internetnews.com. "It's diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don't work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare." Murdoch argues that if Ubuntu were truly compatible with Debian, all of the energy going into it could be directed at Sarge and toward getting it released, which is what would really benefit the Debian developer ecosystem as a whole. "I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they're doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian," Murdoch said. "But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released. "In that respect, Ubuntu's popularity is more harmful than helpful." Hmmm, my feelings were that Ubuntu was a positive for the linux community as a whole. It will be interesting to see what happens but I think Debian will be forced to streamline or this "fork" called Ubuntu may steal a lot of their userbase. It appears that Ubuntu is giving a lot of Debian users more of what they want....