[dundee] The most popular Linux foe web servers is CentOS

[Andrew Clayton]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:48:38 +0100, Kris Davidson wrote:

> It would be interesting to do some geographical stuff and some company
> analysis stuff (see what proportion of the numbers come from the big
> hosting companies) and take population into account. Redhat and
> derivatives have always been very popular in the US. Much the same way
> TurboLinux is popular in parts of Asia. I think Europe use to have a
> SuSE bias, might of changed now.
> 
> I'd probably pay for some support, just as a safety net/covering my
> own ass sort of thing, but it would depend on the company, legal
> considerations and how critical uptime was.
> 
> Question to people who use Fedora on the workstations, I understand
> it's suppose to integrate better, and it's easier just working with
> one distro, but isn't Fedora supposed to be bleeding edge, a sort of
> test platform. Maybe it's in the same boat as Squeeze but I still
> wouldn't roll that out to business desktops. Just wondering about the
> reasoning?

Well, let's see. I've used Red Hat in some form in all my workplaces.
I switched to it at home around 2000 (from Slackware) so the Red Hat way
of doing things is pretty ingrained by now. Red Hat's way of
thinking/doing things also aligns closely with mine.

So onto Fedora. Well, as I mentioned previously, we use RHEL and CentOS
on servers. So it makes sense to use some form of Red Hat on
our workstations (and I mean _everyones_ workstation). So it's a toss up
between something that changes every 6 months (though I only update once
a year to even releases) against something that changes every 7 years.

People (especially the developers) always want the latest and
greatest, think all the recent enhancements around X alone. Fedora
fits that bill nicely. And if we're working on some multimedia project,
it's good to have the latest GStreamer, Pulseaudio etc

Yes, Fedora is a bleeding edge distribution, and so you sometimes get
cut. But the benefits easily outweigh any small amount of pain you might
occasionally experience. 

Fedora is generally working fine for us. The most recent problem was
WINE update that stopped an app from working, but nothing that couldn't
be fixed.

Before I joined my current company the boss and his wife we're using
Windows, but now they say they'd go back.

As for using Fedora on the business desktop. It works for us, it might
not for you. If you have the people to support it you should be fine.
Though I'm not sure you should single out Fedora. The main problem will be
applications and that will be true of any Linux distro. Though we only
have three Windows apps we need to use. 

We use Sage Line 50 for payroll, that runs on a windows machine that's
accessed by rdesktop.

We need to use some shitty little encryption program (Entrust) to
decrypt files from the bank (scary). That's the app that runs under
WINE. Some of our customers use gpg so it's not all doom and gloom. 

We have another Windows box for running some payment transaction
software based on an Access database (real scary) again that's
accessed remotely from the Linux workstation. 

And we've been doing this for over 5 years!

Cheers,
Andrew