Matthew Saltzman wrote:
*snip*
level. RHEL5 is still shipping Firefox 1.1.5 AFAIK, and equally ancient
versions of other applications. That may be fine for enterprise
managers, but many single users and developers would like to be able to
keep up with application and toolchain advances.
RHEL5 has the latest 1.5 firefox - but you can easily install 2.0 if you
want to. In fact, RHEL has even created a directory called /usr/local
just to make it easier for you.
RHEL 5 software is not "ancient" versions. It is stable versions.
I ran Fedora 8 on two different computers and experienced much
instability. Running CentOS 5 on them and things were peachy and "just
worked". Same tasks.
There isn't really much I can do in F8 that I can't in CentOS. I may not
be able to easily get pulseaudio working, but I don't think I really
want to. (I probably could if I tried ...)
People talk about TCO and point out that there's lots more application
software bundled with with a typical Linux distro than with Windows.
That's all very good, but unbundled applications have the advantage that
the user isn't tied to the bundled release of the application if they
want to stay with a particular version of the system.
You can update software if you want. Libraries can be difficult if not
packaged properly, but if packaged properly, you should be able to have
many different versions installed at once. Usually the only potential
problem with multiple versions of the same library is conflicts in the
devel package, which end users don't need.
/usr/local and /opt are good places to install newer versions of
applications. For example, you can install FireFox 2 and Thunderbird 2
in /usr/local on RHEL 5. You will also need to install the RHEL provided
older version of libstdc++.
Fedora is a moving target, which is something that its users have to
accept. Most of us do.
Some of us accept it--or even welcome it--for some things but find that
it's a burden for others. There's no reason not to consider changes in
policy that would address some of the disadvantages of this situation
without doing too much violence to the advantages.
Third party package repositories (ie livna) do that quite well.
I don't mind dealing with the need to go get third-party software from
third parties. One has to do so for Windows as well. The set of things
that one needs to get from third parties in order to have a system that
performs most of the common tasks a user expects is just different.
But there seems to be an attitude on the part of some people in the
community that the best way to pressure vendors of proprietary software
to open their code is to force users who need that software to suffer
without it. I think that alienates users and is counterproductive.
No - no one wants to force users to suffer.
The user community is full of resources to help the new user out and get
those things working. Usually it is only difficult because the new user
thinks it needs to be and tries to do things the wrong way, counter to
instructions clearly given numerous times on mail lists and newsgroup
postings.
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