Jesse Keating wrote: > The how much is the beef. 4~6 month release cycle (somewhat normal), > but errata only supplied for 3~4 months after the next release, > giving each Fedora Core release a 7~10 month life span. Also, Fedora > will do away with the previous strive to keep binary compatability > going, and instead bring in as much new stuff as possible, making > rolling updates impossible. Havoc has sated that Desktop users and > production environments are no longer the target audience of > RHL/Fedora, instead the hobby market is, with fast changes and > constant new features. THis makes Fedora all but unusable in any > production place, where RHL was still VERY useable, even with it's > 1year+ lifespan. > > The bottom line is, RHL as we know it is gone. Period. In it's > place, we have some of the RHL bits, being paired with the Fedora > contents, and the start of a rapidly moving, constantly changing > hobby distro that is possibly full of breakage. Sound like Gentoo > anybody? Those of us that have build our businesses and practices > around Red Hat Linux are now left at a choice between forking over > _large_ amounts of money that we can't really afford for RHEL, or > changing our businesses to go with a different vendor of Linux, one > that is undoubtedly lesser quality than RHL of old and RHEL of > current, or trying to make Fedora Core a viable solution, putting in > tons of man hours to try and maintain backports for customers who > just can't change everything every 9~ months. > > Thats the beef, or at least my part of it. Yep. Looks like beef with mad cow desease for me... Both at work and at home I want a stable and reliable system with a long lifespan. Fast changes are dangerous! If I wanted that, I'd go for Mandrake or S.u.S.E... Currently I run RHL 7.3 in both places, which now need to be replaced because errata support ends. Fedora isn't an option. Red hat Enterprise might be an option at work, but with the bad economy the budget is very tight. I'm not saying Red Hat is too expensive, but there is Debian... And for my home machines Red Hat Enterprise makes no sense at all - I just need a stable OS with a very few applications (browser, mail, newsreader, Emacs, some compilers like gcc and Perl), which should get security patches for a long time. Installing new OS/application versions every half a year just isn't worth the hassle. The needs of others may be different, but this are mine. Paying Red Hat Enterprise prices for this little home machine isn't exactly what I'd call "worth the price". This means I will have to look at other distros if I find a model that suits my needs better, because Red Hat now abandons me. Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to pay for good service (I always bought the boxed sets even though I never installed most of them), but there's a limit where it looks like overpriced for my needs. Red Hat came near this limit with the changes for RHL 8.0 and RHL 9 already, and all I hear of Fedora makes me believe that this change will be far too expensive for my needs. So now I'm articulating my concerns, before it's completely too late. It would be a pity if I have to leave behind my favourite distro - but then, Red Hat leaves me behind - my needs didn't change, but Red Hat did. :-((( I can only hope that Red Hat realizes they'll lose a lot of loyal long-term customers. If they proceed, they will lose me, and most probably my company as well. For now, I will wait a while and hope for the best, but also I will look for other options, and prepare the move. And I already stopped to recommend Red Hat Linux (now Fedora) for both office and home use. Best regards, Martin Stricker -- Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/ Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/ Red Hat Linux 8.0 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/ Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/ -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
