[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[Bruce Richardson]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 11:17:58AM +0100, JLMS wrote:
> How you consider productive humiliating in this way a developer  is
> beyond me. The system administrator job is to ensure other people
> don't find themselves in this situation at all.

No humiliation is involved.  Geeks trash their workstations sometimes;
it just isn't a big deal.  Putting useless and unproductive restrictions
on talented developers is rather more humiliating for them.

> I think we are coming from completely different angles of the
> industry. The developers I have worked with charge £300 to £500 a day
> for their work, in such an environment it is simply not applicable to
> waste their time asking them to fix things, I still fail to understand
> in which environment it is a good idea.

I'll happily provide the automatic provisioning that will make
reinstallation of their workstation a triviality.  I'll also happily let
them do that themselves at their own time.  Developers are more than
capable of the few mouse clicks or keypresses necessary and often want
to tailor things to a particular task or set-up (and next month it'll be
something different).

 I don't see the point in locking them into restrictions that actally do
no good.  It's really impossible to come up with a set of restrictions
that can prevent people from messing up their workstation or launching
an accidental flood of network connections - unless you turn off the
computer and disconnect it from the network.  Since you need to design
your network and environments to cope with malicious and accidental
disruption anyway, desktop restrictions don't actually gain you
anything.


-- 
Bruce

If the universe were simple enough to be understood, we would be too
simple to understand it.
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