[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[- Tethys]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Joel Bernstein<joel at fysh.org> wrote:

> #1 has no place in a company environment really .. if you want to test
> or evaluate RHEL, contact RH sales and ask for eval licences.

Why do you assume you need to be a company to want a stable server OS?
I have several servers hosted in various locations, all for personal use.

> #2 makes sense, I accept this one

By your logic, largely not. You might as well just use RHEL for that,
since you've already got it for your production systems.

> You need to compile from source anything which isn't distributed as a
> RHEL-blessed package. Obviously this applies to every distro, but to
> see why it matters for CentOS users, just compare the package counts
> of RHEL and Debian Stable. Consider the maintenance cost of building
> your own packages of things the distro doesn't see fit to include
> because it would be tricky to maintain hacky backports to them.

RHEL/CentOS supplies the vast majority of what's needed to run a
server. In the few rare cases where what I need hasn't come in the
standard packages, then EPEL has almost invariably provided it. Your
argument is somewhat of a strawman. Yes, Ubuntu or Debian may have
half a bazillion packages that you won't find in RHEL/CentOS, but
I'd question the need for gsmc or fluidsynth or wings3d on a server.
The same goes for the myriad other largely irrelevant packages that
you'll find in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories.

Your view of enterprise distributions as a collection of hacky
backports is also somewhat at odds with reality. But I doubt I'll
be able to convince you of that.

Tet

-- 
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to
understand the exponential function -- Albert Bartlett
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