bionic vs focal vs buster

[j___r]

What's the diff?

For the newcomer, is there an explanation of the differences between these distro variants?

I'm looking for a lightweight desktop environment for a media server on an Odroid N2+. 

I have more experience with Debian over Ubuntu

 

Jon

Edited August 13, 2020 by j___r

[Werner]

Debian is known to be rocksolid and stable. The software included therefore is older than upstream because its extensivly tested. Bug fixes are usually backported.

 

To make it easy Ubuntu is a Fork of Debian, mostly unstable or experimental branch, adds some fancy desktop stuff and label it stable.

Also Ubuntu maintains only a fraction of the packages includeed by themselves. Most are in "universe" and "multiverse" repositories which are community supported. If a package maintainer decides to no longer maintan a piece of software then you are on your own because nobody official will care.

Also the advertisment von Ubuntu to have five year support is kind a BS, because if you take a look at Debian you will notice and do the math with LTS you will also get five years...

[legogris]

Specifically for media, it can also be worth considering bullseye (unless you have specific reasons to stay on kernel 4.x and/or need Python2). There are a lot of compatibility and bugfixes that aren't in buster (both in kernel and packages such as mesa). Of course you could also still install these on buster or Ubuntu via backports/build from source/external apt repos/ppas.

[Skrith]

I also need this question answered. I can't find anywhere that says what these versions are branches OF. Sure Ubuntu is based on Debian, but what's the actual difference between the branches mentioned? is one Ubuntu while another is Debian??

The packages I'm looking at for my project include all 3 options, with Bionic being the most lightweight. Is it stripped down? without desktop environment? ?????

[Werner]

1 hour ago, Skrith said:

I also need this question answered. I can't find anywhere that says what these versions are branches OF. Sure Ubuntu is based on Debian, but what's the actual difference between the branches mentioned? is one Ubuntu while another is Debian??

The packages I'm looking at for my project include all 3 options, with Bionic being the most lightweight. Is it stripped down? without desktop environment? ?????

It is actually not that complicated.

See, Both Debian and Ubuntu are supporting armhf and arm64 architecture. They provide all their packages for those. The issue is that just a tiny fraction of the SBCs out there are barely supported by them. This is where Armbian steps in. We build a kernel specificly designed and optimized for several boards and put the mentioned packages of your favorite flavor (Debian Buster, Bullseye or Ubuntu Bionic Focal) on top of it to get a working operating system on your board.

We do not provide for each and every constellation an image (every flavor in minimal, standard and desktop variant for example) simply due to lack of ressources. This is not a big issue though because the provided build tools make it comparatively very easy to build your own image with your own constellation of stuff.

[VasilyV]

On 8/13/2020 at 10:31 AM, Werner said:

Also the advertisment von Ubuntu to have five year support is kind a BS, because if you take a look at Debian you will notice and do the math with LTS you will also get five years...

What do you mean for BS acronym?

[Werner]

10 hours ago, VasilyV said:

BS acronym?

bullsh!t

[cubytus]

All right, but what is the difference between Buster and Focal, finally?

The question answered here appears to be "Ubuntu vs Debian"…

[Werner]

On 8/20/2021 at 12:18 AM, cubytus said:

All right, but what is the difference between Buster and Focal, finally?

The question answered here appears to be "Ubuntu vs Debian"…

Because Buster is a Debian Release and Focal is a Ubuntu release. From Armbian's point of view they are identical since our images share the same kernel and u-boot package.