[Sussex] Question re: my presentation

[Geoff Teale]

Paul,

You've stumbled on the single biggest problem with Debian - it's stable
version is always massively out of date and if you use unstable or
testing then you're throwing away the only real benefit Debian has (well
tested software).  Almost every box we get now seems to need massive
amounts of work to get it running on Debian stable :-(

Maintaining your own packages to support hardware (as we do here) is an
option, but it really doesn't scale well across a large enterprise.  Now
we have distros like Ubuntu that give us most of the advantages offered
by Debian stable (well tested core packages, deb/apt rather than RPM),
but have up to date packages and hardware support inline with the likes
of Fedora or SuSE.  

For these reasons Debian's days as our preferred platform for our
application are likely to be numbered - I imagine most other people
trying to use Linux in non-trivial installations will increasingly steer
away from Debian in favour of distros that are frankly less of a pain in
the arse.  

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 13:14 +0000, Paul Graydon wrote:
> With slightly older, not so cutting edge machines perhaps?  Woody just
> doesn't work right on my test box, without a large amount of command line
> work.  Suse and Fedora worked fine out of the box, apart from the necessary,
> but automated, downloading on the Nvidia driver, presenting everything the
> beginner user might need without having to even touch the command prompt.
> Its not like my test rig is particularly unusual either, being based on an
> Nforce2 motherboard, which has been around for at least two years.  *shrug*

-- 
Geoff Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology