"Goodbye my dear, I'm leaving you for your mother"
November 14, 2025
Before you judge me based on the title of this post, I should clarify that it has nothing to do with my family life (or lack thereof).
Back in 2005, I came across a similar headline on a blog: "Goodbye my dear, I'm leaving you for your daughter" The odd thing was, I was reading a tech blog, and the strangest part? The author wasn't actually abandoning his wife for his stepdaughter. He was talking about operating systems.
By 2004, the Linux distribution Debian was already well known and highly regarded in the Linux community for its stability and vast array of applications. However, it wasn't particularly beginner friendly and stubbornly refused to include applications or drivers that didn't fully comply with free software standards.
To address Debian's shortcomings, Canonical released the first version of Ubuntu in October 2004; The 2004.10 "Warty Warthog". Not only did it fix Debian's issues, but it also added drivers that didn't meet the strict "open source" criteria, while making system configuration far easier.
But the key point is that Ubuntu is based on Debian, it's essentially its offspring. Hence the blog's title: the author was leaving Debian for Ubuntu, abandoning the "mother" for the "daughter."
And this is where the reason for my title comes in.
In 2007 I bought my first laptop. After 17 years of using Microsoft products, I decided my computer had suffered enough; in August 2007 I started looking for a Linux distribution that could enable my laptop's Wi-Fi.
The only one that worked was Ubuntu, so I installed it on my laptop and, shortly afterward, on my desktop PC.
After that, I used Ubuntu on every machine, sticking to the LTS releases from 2008 through 2024.
It was the 2024.04 release that made me question whether it was worth keeping: the distro felt… unfinished, some utilities didn’t work, or worked poorly; others were missing or behaved differently.
So in 2025 I installed Debian 12 on my laptop, and it worked perfectly.
That’s why I’ve decided to leave the "daughter" (Ubuntu) for the "mother" (Debian). It runs better, and I’m no longer a newbie. The switch hasn’t been easy Debian still feels… rough in places. I miss some apps, but I’ve learned to live without them (Ubuntu Cleaner especially). Since Ubuntu is derived from Debian, I could probably pull in the missing ones, yet I don’t want to pollute my install with cross-package mixing. Maybe I’ll do it on Debian 13 and report back.
See you next time!