Re: Fedora Or <Brand X>?

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 19:48, Mark Gordon wrote:
> - 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.

Well, whilst that wasn't what I was hoping to hear, it is an answer.
Thank you, Mark. I'm not sure quite what I'll do come April 30th.
Judging from remarks by SuSE users on this list there are still a few
teething problems with SuSE and XD2, although given that you're both
owned by Novell those will obviously get fixed. I think I may switch to
Fedora Core 2 in the short term and sadly forgo Ximian Desktop for an
interim period. When XD3 (or whatever it is going to be called) comes
out officially I will probably then switch over to SuSE. What a pain. I
really feel "at home" in Red Hat -- I know where everything is, and just
how they've customised Apache (particularly important for me), etc.
Plus, lots of my clients run it on their servers in one form or another.
Now I'll have to learn that stuff all over again for SuSE. Red Hat's
GNOME desktop is really good, and it sounds like they're bringing in
more and more people to work on it, but nothing comes close to the
goodness that is Ximian's desktop product. As a web developer the whole
desktop/server dichotomy is a lot less clearly defined -- on my
workstation I need a top-notch desktop environment with well-integrated
office productivity apps for letters, accounts, presentations, and
project management, but I also need to have a server-type environment
which is fairly similar to what my clients are running. RHL9+XD2 was
pretty damn perfect for that -- now I either lose Ximian Desktop or the
Red Hat OS. I know SuSE and Red Hat are *practically* identical, but the
devil is in the details as they say.

Thanks again Mark.

Best, Darren

-- 
=====================================================================
D. D. Brierton            [email protected]          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
=====================================================================

_______________________________________________
Users maillist  -  [email protected]
http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/users