[sf-lug] debian vs ubuntu question

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim.stockford at gmail.com):

> Does the current release of Debian have
> none
> some
> all
> of the problems in Ubuntu 18.04
> ?


Please pardon a small jest in the formatting (but for a serious answer):

       I
     tend
    to think
   this is an
'iceberg question'.

Which is to say, you're of course asking something you're interested in
finding out about, but your question is based on assumptions that are
best examined, to find out whether perhaps you are trying to solve the
wrong problem -- in short, that the interesting stuff is below the
surface.

I would guess that you're assuming that your recent problem with the
wireless driver owed to some defect in Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS, and 
thus are wondering whether you should distro-hop to something else.
Thing is, though, that this assumption seems really unlikely.  I really,
really doubt that your Ubuntu installation's wireless configuration
spontaneously broke, and doubt that a bug in Ubuntu caused the breakage.

Unfortunately, now that you've shipped your laptop back to its vendor to
have them do an OS reinstallation, you'll never be able to figure out
who or what bollixed your wireless installation.  So, that's now
officially a dead question.  My concern on your behalf going forwards 
is making sure you won't need to repeatedly ship your laptop across the
country just to have the vendor reinstall it.  

Ordinarily, I'd advise users 'Dude, just keep an installable image of
your distro around on the shelf, know how to use it, and be prepared if
necessary to reinstall.'  Obviously, you chose this time to have the
vendor do it, instead, but wouldn't it be nice to make a snapshot of
the freshly installed system, the moment you get it back?  I would
earnestly recommend you do that, as cheap insurance.  (If you'd done
that before, you'd have been able to avoid needing to ship the hardware
across the country.  See my point?)

Here's what you do:  Get yourself whatever live Linux distro you're
comfortable with.  (Whatever you like.) Get yourself a nice large USB
external drive at least as capacious as your Linux partition (I assume
there's only one) on your Linux laptop.  Once you have your laptop back,
boot the live distro (from optical disk or flash drive).  Plug in the
external USB drive.  Figure out what device nodes the laptop hard drive
and the external USB drive are.  Use 'dd' to do a bitwise copy of
the laptop hard drive to the external USB drive.  You're done.  
You now have a pristine safety copy, verbatim (stored on ice) of your
laptop's entire contents.  I'm skipping over details, but a LUG meeting
can help you.  (To do it with whooshing graphical programs instead of dd, 
use something like Clonezilla Live.)