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cutterjohn42 · 09-10-2009, 09:57 AM

Actually, I like the binary distros as I had my fill of dependency hell YEARS ago.

Ubuntu does what Debian does as well. They release a particular version of apps + kernel + X.org with a release and backport security fixes to that version. Alternatively you can sometimes find newer version in the various PPAs, or the backports repo from the next release. But since Ubuntu has a 6m release cycle you're pretty close to the bleeding edge all of the time anyways.

Lastly, and entirely undesireable(and mostly unnecessary) is to build more recent version from "source". [EDIT] Good thing about Ubuntu being a Debian derived distro is that one can usually find source .debs to build from and therefore not break your entire system(hopefully) if you decided to install system wide... [/EDIT]

The only good reason to use a source based distro is to be able to compile with specific architectural optimizations, but I found the few %age points of performance to no be worth the hassle.

(That said the only version of calibre in the Ubuntu repos is very very very old....)

09-10-2009, 09:57 AM	#10
cutterjohn42 Addict Posts: 274 Karma: 1029955 Join Date: Feb 2009 Device: Palm IIIx, EBM-911, REB-1100(dead), PRS-505	Actually, I like the binary distros as I had my fill of dependency hell YEARS ago. Ubuntu does what Debian does as well. They release a particular version of apps + kernel + X.org with a release and backport security fixes to that version. Alternatively you can sometimes find newer version in the various PPAs, or the backports repo from the next release. But since Ubuntu has a 6m release cycle you're pretty close to the bleeding edge all of the time anyways. Lastly, and entirely undesireable(and mostly unnecessary) is to build more recent version from "source". [EDIT] Good thing about Ubuntu being a Debian derived distro is that one can usually find source .debs to build from and therefore not break your entire system(hopefully) if you decided to install system wide... [/EDIT] The only good reason to use a source based distro is to be able to compile with specific architectural optimizations, but I found the few %age points of performance to no be worth the hassle. (That said the only version of calibre in the Ubuntu repos is very very very old....) Last edited by cutterjohn42; 09-10-2009 at 10:01 AM.