[Gloucs] Bad Karma

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:52:46AM +0000, Francis Barton wrote:
> I got fed up with Ubuntu breaking every time I tried to dist-upgrade.
> Variously, I had problems with broken fstabs + not finding partitions, or if
> that worked then I would have X server config problems or something else
> equally annoying.
> 

Personal rant follows :) [Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Debian, Ubuntu 
and Fedora communities and contribute to each in varying extents.]

In the widest Linux community, we never forget you have a choice :)  

Debian

_Large_ distribution. The basis for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-alikes as well as 
Knoppix and 30-100 other active derived distributions. Long development 
period means that some packages in Debian stable are old. 1000 
developers worldwide. Releases once every two years or so: releases 
supported for a year after the next release. If you want more up to date 
- try Debian testing :)

Ubuntu 

Ubuntu is designed primarily for a specific target audience - people who 
want a desktop that just works, has an amount of new features with each 
release and is ... pragmatic ... about the need to run only Free software.
It's greatest weakness is that it is forked from Debian unstable on a 
strict six month cycle - there are relatively few core developers and 
some instability results. Intended primarily for desktop users, 
initially.

Ubuntu derived distributions

Generally slightly modified. May include non-free drivers out of the box 
/ user enhancements. Linux Mint is probably one of the more well known 
of these. Sound / wifi / other firmware is likely to work :) These 
distributions generally lag Ubuntu so issues found in Ubuntu may be 
resolved here. Very small numbers of developers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed for servers, stability and large 
corporates - if you can afford to build a rackful of brand name servers 
in a hosted data centre then someone, somewhere will mandate that your 
services are critical and need Red Hat support personnel at the end of 
a phone to shout at. The development community is a closed 
community and largely a closed book. Nominally fixed at release time, - 
and therefore binary compatible throughout a major release - in 
practice, there is slow change, there are huge numbers of tacit 
backports and fixes which are barely documented in the course of the 
seven year support and a steady flow of "preview releases/features" with 
each Red Hat point release. Paid for support means that verified updates 
keep your system up to date and that these are the only means of 
updating Red Hat. 

Red Hat derived community

Centos

CentOS is Red Hat for the poor - all the same quality, but you get to do 
all your own support and community-contributed code is a completely unknown 
quantity. The active development community is relatively small but 
focussed - primarily on repacking Red Hat .rpms and legitimately 
removing branding. Red Hat fulfil their obligations under the GPL by 
releasing source, Centos satisfy underfunded users by providing a binary 
compatible distribution for those that can't afford full Red Hat 
support costs and Red Hat maintains a pool of Red Hat capable users who 
will probably pay for Red Hat at some point when they can 
afford to/someone tells them to :)

Fedora

Fedora is a Red Hat alike Linux distribution only in the sense that it 
uses .rpm and is the community developed distribution from which Red Hat 
cherry picks features for Red Hat Enterprise (Fedora having been forked 
from Red Hat originally when Red Hat Enterprise Linux became a fully 
commercial product). It has a large number of developers, a fierce 
commitment to Free software - and a cavalier attitude to server compromises, 
root privileges and user installation of packages. [See Fedora 12] It is 
developed on a set six month cycle and is supported for only 18 months. 
It is dynamically unstable and intended to be such as a forcing house for 
new development. It is not suited for casual users or, possibly, any 
other than committed Fedora developers.

> This has happened too many times to me, so I switched to Linux Mint (
> linuxmint.com) which I love, so far.  OK, it's not updated as often as
> Ubuntu, but I have been _so_ impressed.
> 
> > Any one else having a bad time with Karmic Koala? My laptop (never Linux
> > friendly) hates it and seems to have most bugs whinged about on the
> > forums. Should have stuck with JJ. A fresh KK install hasn't made things
> > better. Next stop Fedora 12.
> >

On my netbook, a clean install of Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been the most 
successful Linux thus far on that platform. Horses for courses ... ?

> > --
> > Best Regards
> > Glyn Davies
> >

All best,

AndyC