Andreas Barth: “We expect to release Etch as planned in the beginning of December 2006.”
Excellent, excellent news. I cannot overemphasize how important it is that Debian release Etch on time. Between this, Ubuntu’s commitment to LSB certify Dapper (a huge step toward enabling ISVs to target Debian and Ubuntu with a single certification), and recent industry events, this is shaping up to be Debian’s breakout year. Significant delays or even uncertainty in the Etch schedule, though, changes that pretty substantially.
I think this is good news as well. I run Ubuntu, but would rather be running Debian. However, I don’t run to run 2 year old code, no matter how stable.
My concern is for Debian to increase their focus on the desktop. I see a lot of hardware, video card, power management, etc. bugs in the Ubuntu bug database (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs) and these bugs might exist in Debian but aren’t known because Debian has a smaller number of desktop users. How can Debian fix bugs it has but doesn’t know about?
Ubuntu is buried in bugs and needs Debian’s help. Ubuntu might plan on supporting Dapper for 5 years, but I think it has too many bugs (and the OSS world is moving too quickly) for anyone to really care.