Ubuntu Linux experiences?

[Travis Roy]

> Excellent - this is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about. Can
> you be more specific about which 3rd party packages were causing
> problems?

Flash, newer version of Firefox, mplayer, to name a few.

> I was initially under the impression that the distro could use any
> packages from Debian as well. Is that not the case?

Well, it was causing version and dependancy hell. Something most older 
RH/RPM users are more then familure with. An example was for me to 
install mplayer I needed libraries, but the libraries I had were needed 
for other programs. Because of the conflict between the Ubuntu and other 
apt repositories I was using it couldn't find a happy "fix".

I was using 3rd party Ubuntu repositories. I've heard that if you set up 
to only use debian repositories then do a dist-upgrade that would 
correct most of the problems I had, but I didn't really mess with it 
that much.

> 
>>The new debian installer is very nice and very easy to follow, you might 
>>want to give debian another go.
> 
> 
> I'll consider it, but I'm looking for something that can be used as a
> both a quickly evolving desktop distribution but which also has long
> term support for enterprise applications. Ubuntu initially struck me as
> a single distribution that could do both. 

Ubuntu from what I've seen and used has a very limited package 
repository by default if you're looking for enterprise applications. 
Hell, it didn't even have an updated Firefox :(