Re: Fedora Or <Brand X>?

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 20:39, D. D. Brierton wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 00:40, Glen Baker wrote:
> 
> > With Redhat now officially giving up the ghost on RH9 support I'm faced
> > with a quandry: should I switch to Fedora or go with some other
> > distribution?
> > 
> > Let's assume that I'd really like to keep using the Ximian
> > desktop/tools. Is there a preference out there?
> 
> I wish Ximian would make some kind of official announcement. RHL9's EOL
> is 30th April. There must be many many RHL9+XD2 users out there like
> myself, many of whom are (again, like myself) paying customers. Given
> that it looks unlikely that XD3 will be out by 30th April we need some
> guidance as to what upgrade strategy we should adopt. I want an OS that
> will be an XD3 supported platform, and at the moment SuSE is the only
> platform that I am absolutely certain XD3 will be available for.
> However, I also want to take the path of least resistance, which in my
> case would mean moving over to Fedora Core 2 (RHEL3 is too expensive and
> doesn't actually contain all of the apps I actually use).
> 
> Regardless of Ximian's previous policies on this issue, I actually think
> they owe paying customers who use RHL9 some response on this issue. I
> can't believe that they haven't already decided whether Fedora will be a
> supported platform for XD3.
> 
> Best, Darren

- Fedora can be thought of as an rpm-based analogue of Debian unstable. 
It represents the bleeding edge, and it moves sufficiently quickly that
it's impractical for any ISV to provide software that will continue to
work after the next bleeding-edge update comes along.  I don't expect
any ISV to support software on Fedora.  Even Red Hat concedes this last
point: http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html

- RLEL3 is expensive partly by virtue of the support that comes with
it.  XD2 makes enough changes to a platform (I've compared it to an OS
upgrade in many regards) that it's unrealistic to expect such support
contracts to remain valid in the face of such changes.  I wouldn't
expect XD2 or anything similar to get certified from Red Hat for its
commercial platforms.  Ximian Connector is small enough that it could
presumably get certified, even if it brought in Evolution, GAL, and
GtkHTML updates, but you're both seemingly asking about the desktop in
particular.  Something like Oracle could easily be certified; it doesn't
require replacing large numbers of system packages.  Our desktop is a
completely different story.

- Ximian and SUSE are both now owned by Novell.

My advice to users considering switching distributions and interested in
continuing to use Ximian software whenever possible is to consider SUSE.

-Mark Gordon

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