Hitting the Debian Lenny sweet spot

During much of the time I was running Ubuntu, I told myself that I'd be running Debian instead, if only I could get everything working.

I have tried the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 build, and I still appreciate so many things working out of the box on my 2002-03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

Even the USB Headphone Set sound module I've been using was able to play system sounds and Flash audio in Ubuntu.

However, I recently was able to get that sound module to work in Debian Lenny.

All I had to do was plug it into a different USB port on the Toshiba, and now it's working fine.

I have it plugged directly into the middle USB port.

I had been plugging it into a powered Linksys USB hub, which I've been using to supply enough juice to my Toshiba 500 GB USB backup drive, and while I could get the USB Headphone Set sound module to work in applications such as Totem and Audacity, I couldn't get the system sounds and Flash audio to play.

But now I have full audio working in Debian.

I have Debian Multimedia in my /etc/apt/sources.list. I have working Flash and Java. On hardware of this age and specs (1.3 GHz Celeron and 1 GB RAM), you can feel the relative lightness of the GNOME environment in Debian as compared to Ubuntu. And I appreciate the speed boost.

I'm about to look into rolling newer apps (Iceweasel/Firefox, OpenOffice) into Lenny via Debian Backports.

Except that I really don't need Firefox 3.5.x or OO 3.1 ... so I just might let that go for awhile.

And with all the trouble with Xorg and these "older" Intel video chips, I'm not eager to move to Debian Squeeze, and I'll probably wait until it goes stable and then try a Debian Live CD to see how the video reacts on this laptop, should I still be running it at that point.

But as the title says, I've got everything working and have hit the sweet spot with Debian.

Productivity, lack of fiddling and blissfully fewer updates are all things I welcome.

And if my past many-dozen entries haven't spelled it out, I don't consider Debian any harder to install, configure and use than Ubuntu. Most of the Ubuntu help out there will work in Debian (the former being based on the latter), and there's quite a bit of Debian-specific help available.

I'd sure like to see at least one Debian how-to book out there (and while "The Debian System," slated to be updated this year, will be a very welcome addition to my bookshelf, if it's anything like the last edition it'll be more philsophical than hard-core how-to).

Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is a great thing. But the shoulders upon which it stands — those of the Debian Project — are more than capable of supporting desktop users.