[cumbria_lug] Red Hat^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFedora - opinions...

[Michael Saunders]

Lo Schwuk,

Good post -- I fully agree with the stuff you said, and equally wish
them well with this venture. With RH's QA processes in place and
greater community input, it'll hopefully remain a strong distro choice
for the desktop.

OTOH, the planned release cycle is waaaaay too fast; with a new
release every 4 months (and total of 7 months security errata), it's
too much of a moving target to be used in any serious scenario. As
hideously rubbish as Win98 is, the fact that people can still use it
and run most new software is a great boost for Microsoft. Getting
inexperienced users to upgrade their distros at least every 18 months
just to run the latest GAIM is not doable.

SUSE (nee SuSE) have decided to stretch out their releases -- a good
thing, and could make it a better call than Fedora on newcomers'
boxes. With the outrageous popularity growth Linux is seeing, though,
I'd wager that RH will release a 'Personal Desktop' (or similar)  
within a couple of years (they've made noises about this). If it has 2
years of support and fixes, well-tested major upgrades for GNOME/KDE
when necessary and a solid base for hardware vendors to target drivers
against, it will be superb.

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Schwuk wrote:

> Would you want to put an OS that only has a guaranteed lifespan of
> 6-9 months on your server? I wouldn't.

Indeed. But you don't _have_ to pay for RHEL -- the ISOs can be found
online, and as errata are produced the SRPMs are made freely available
on RH's FTP site. Granted, it's not quite as straightforward and clean
as up2date/RHN et al., but 'rpm -bb foo.spec && rpm -ivh ../blah' is
still a cinch.

I was planning to do this (install RHEL WS 3.0 beta and upgrade via 
SRPMs when the final is out), but have since become a Slacker :)

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk