[Cumbria] Re: All that flamefestery

[Chris Plant]

On Sun, 2003-01-05 at 22:30, Michael Saunders wrote:
> Lo all!
> 
> Some of you may know me, some not, and some would probably never want to
> know me. I'm an LXF writer living in Ye Olde Market Towne of Ulverston,
> and I'm Chris Plant's hero. At least that's what he says.
Ohh Mike!  I love you!
> 
> Anyway, to dive headfirst into the fray:
> 
> Ken quipped:
> >
> > Why should Red Hat 'b*****' about with KDE and Gnome when the rest of
> > the Linux fraternity concentrates on getting the distro right? Probably
> > for selfish (commercial) reasons.  I believe that if this attitude
> > proliferates we'll end up with a lot of different versions of Linux
> > (etc) as happened to Unix.
> 
> Well, we won't see anything like the same kind of fragmentation that
> afflicted commercial Unices many moons ago simply due to the licensing.  
> Forks happen, people split off separate projects, but ultimately there's a
> kind of software Darwninism in place -- thanks to the GPL, if somebody
> adds something great, it'll trickle into the other projects too.
> 
> As for Red Hat, many people see them as being overly commercial but as
> others have suggested they need to retain a strong corporate image to
> continue their sales. Despite the impression many get, RH make pretty much
> diddly-squat from selling shrinkwrapped boxed-sets -- their dough comes
> from huge support contracts to megacorps like Shell etc.
> 
> There's validity in the argument that RH isn't being entirely fair to KDE
> in their latest release (go on Chris, flame away!) but as a company
> they've been good for the free software community -- even RMS has said so.  
> By funding GCC, glibc, GNOME etc. development they deserve respect.
Yep, they have messed with KDE, but I don't care too much :)
> 
> Chris uttered:
> >
> > And RedHat can't be that buggy, because it consistant gets good reviews.
> 
> Apart from RH 7.0's slightly problematic release... But I do agree with
> the jist of your argument. RH's .0 jobs tend to be a proving ground for
> new tech, like the hybrid desktop in the latest, and it's not wise to
> commit to it straight away. Fortunately their support is second to none
> and updated errata packages are usually available hours after any serious
> problems are discovered.
Well, you quoted me slightly out of context, but on a basis of good
review = quality, they seem to have decent quality releases.
> 
> As for YaST -- it's a love/hate thing really. Personally I prefer to just
> get my hands dirty in the raw config files, but YaST has attempted to
> accomplish something few other Linux admin tools have: be a one-stop
> solution. LinuxConf was glitchy and limited, and not tried Webmin for a
> while (but it looks decent). So YaST may have its flaws but as a central
> point of configuration, for those who don't know the ins-and-outs of the
> system, it's respectable.
Well, I've used Linuxconf, webmin is ok, linuxconf was a bitch, but suse
just annoys me from its start.  Maybe its because its similar enough to
redhat for me to expect it to be as sane as redhat.


Chris