wattOS R8 Is Now Based On Debian Rather Than Ubuntu

[phoronix]

Phoronix: wattOS R8 Is Now Based On Debian Rather Than Ubuntu

For five years the wattOS Linux distribution has been around as being an energy-efficient distribution powered at its core by Ubuntu, but with their new release they have shifted to being powered by Debian...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY4NzU

[enihcam]

Phoronix: wattOS R8 Is Now Based On Debian Rather Than Ubuntu

For five years the wattOS Linux distribution has been around as being an energy-efficient distribution powered at its core by Ubuntu, but with their new release they have shifted to being powered by Debian...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY4NzU

Alpine Linux is the most energy-efficient distribution. You can benchmark it and compare with others.

http://alpinelinux.org/

[b15hop]

Alpine Linux is the most energy-efficient distribution. You can benchmark it and compare with others.
http://alpinelinux.org/

What about for an ARM machine?

[xeekei]

This is starting to be a recurring theme. Leaving Ubuntu for Debian.

[Jumbo21]

This is starting to be a recurring theme. Leaving Ubuntu for Debian.

Not surprising, I hate Ubuntu, and not because it's the popular thing to do.

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

This is starting to be a recurring theme. Leaving Ubuntu for Debian.

Which I don't understand why because the Ubuntu base is seriously the easiest and best base you can base your distro off of.

[fedesog]

Which I don't understand why because the Ubuntu base is seriously the easiest and best base you can base your distro off of.

Perhaps because it tends to break less between releases compared to ubuntu and is building a distro based on debian is quite easy as well.

I'm wondering if wattOS R8 has any advantage in term of power consumption compared to other lightweight distros, a few years ago Michael tested wattOS R4 against ubuntu 11.04 (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ttos_vs_ubuntu) and there wasn't really any advantage.

[Vim_User]

Which I don't understand why because the Ubuntu base is seriously the easiest and best base you can base your distro off of.

Would you like to elaborate what exactly is better or easier in Ubuntu compared to Debian when it comes to basing your distro on it?

[chrisb]

Perhaps because it tends to break less between releases compared to ubuntu and is building a distro based on debian is quite easy as well.

Not really. Ubuntu and Debian are very similar, most of the packages are the same. Upgrade breakage is usually caused by apt-get and third party repositories being used, causing dependency problems. I guess you could argue that there are fewer third party repositories supporting Debian so it happens less often, but if Debian had hundreds of PPAs it would be the same. Other most common breakage is Xorg and GPU drivers, and that affects Debian and Ubuntu the same, though there are more Ubuntu desktop users so you do see more reports there. I'm running Jessie - the stable release of Debian wouldn't even boot on my laptop, despite the laptop being 1.5 years old now (problem, unsurprisingly, GPU drivers). Ubuntu at least put some effort into hardware enablement, even 12.04 works.

[chrisb]

Would you like to elaborate what exactly is better or easier in Ubuntu compared to Debian when it comes to basing your distro on it?

Debian don't do hardware enablement for the stable release, so if you want to base off a stable release and have it work on modern hardware you have to do it yourself and ship a different kernel and xorg etc. (like Valve do for Steam OS). Ubuntu based distributions don't have to do that, they can base off an LTS and be confident it will work on new hardware.

Try installing Ubuntu LTS vs Debian stable on a recent laptop with HiDPI, modern GPU, Broadcom WiFi etc. Neither is a great experience, but Ubuntu is a bit better. And since I know that someone will mention Jessie here - did you know that the installer, right now, does not support touchpads? And that chromium doesn't install? Or that the Gnome display settings does not work (I literally can't configure a monitor without Xrandr). Debian is great but it can be a bit of work sometimes.