Re: Long-term Stability Distros (was Re: [tlug] Flash and Firexfox 2)

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:38:15PM -0400, jep200404 wrote:
> Jim Breen wrote:
> 
> 
> Of course, if you like Debian, you should also consider Ubuntu. 
> It has similar apt-get goodness, and supports the proprietary 
> dark side (e.g. Flash?) more than purists. 

It's also aimed at giving a pain free experience.  Its stated number one
bug is that MS is more popular.  I can't fairly compare the two, as I
throw Ubuntu on something to see what they're doing, or perhaps for a
friend, and take all defaults, while Fedora/CentOS are where I do my
actual work--it's possible if I stayed with all the RH based systems'
defaults, I would have fewer issues.

> 
> > I'm quited pissed off with the way Fedora changes releases
> > so quickly and shuts off updates. 

<snicker>  Errm, join the club.  
> 
> Yup. Red Hat is quite mercenary about this. It's a very important 
> part of their business plan to drive folks to paying for the 
> stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). There are several 
> free recompilations of RHEL, the most popular of which is Centos. 

In fairness, they are (at least Fedora is) trying to improve the update
experience. I actually updated from 7 to 8 to 9 fairly painlessly.

> 
> 
> > ... but long-term stability is a major point with me. 
> 
> That narrows the market, making your shopping easier. 
> 
> The Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (long term support) version should be of 
> significant interest to you. 

>From what I understand, and this is hearsay, not experience, updates
break things more than they should in a LTS version. Again, however, if
you're really thinking of a Deb distro, either Ubuntu or perhaps Mint is
the way to go.  

> If you are going to RHEL/Centos now, you would install 
> RHEL/Centos 5, and have about another five years of support. 
> We're due for a new major version, so if you wait a while, 
> you could probably install RHEL/Centos 6, and stick with it 
> for 7 years. 

RH has already released. CentOS is coming quite soon, possibly a week or
two.  5.3 will have several good changes, noticeably in hardware
support--for example, 5.2 didn't support the increasingly common Realtek
8169 card.  

> Red Hat has its own way of doing things, so there are big 
> differences between Fedora/RHEL/Centos and Debian/Ubuntu. 
> Migrating from Fedora to RHEL or Centos will be easier 
> than migrating to Debian or Ubuntu. 

<nods in strong agreement.>
> 
> > I like to put something in, polish it up, and leave it.
> 
> I recommend that you try several distros before choosing 
> which one to polish. 
> 

I do find that CentOS is usually pretty much set it and forget it.  I
would recommend waiting the week or two (that's not a firm date--unlike
Ubuntu/Fedora, rather than release on schedule, they make sure it's
working first) and getting 5.3 rather than 5.2.  

(It will also support ext4 though you'd need a separate /boot
partition).  

One advantage of Ubuntu is that, although you have to tweak a few things
to get OpenOffice 3, it will work with Japanese.  For some obscure
reason, neither myself nor the forums' toracat can get OO3 to work with
Japanese in CentOS, at least in 5.2.


If you are used to RH based distros, there is much to be said for
sticking with it so that you can do your work rather than learning the
new ins and outs of something else. 

To my mild surprise, on a BSD forum, when an informal poll was taken, it
turned out that most who use Linux use CentOS.  (I had thought that to
BSD-ers, the more BSD like Gentoo and Arch would have won.) 

The reason we all gave was that it gave us a very stable platform where
we could do our work and not worry about the underlying O/S.  We could,
for example, concentrate on tweaking postfix, rather than testing this,
that and the other to make sure the O/S would work. 


-- 
Scott Robbins
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