Submitted by Ed Hurst (not verified) on Tue, 2008/12/30 - 22:57.
Coming very late to the game, I have truly enjoyed the debate here. Thank, you Dag, for addressing this issue (not to mention a thousand other thanks I owe you as a long time user of your packages). I'm running CentOS for the reasons outlined -- five+ years of support for the same product. Further, if there was a SLED version of the same, I would probably switch in a heartbeat. The sticking point remains the steady stream of security update and bug fix SRPMs from Novell. Annual service packs won't do it. I'd build them myself without a supporting distro organization. Were they available, not only would I be running that cloned SLED right now, I'd be offering it to all my clients as their best alternative to that monopoly OS. Less than a five-year cycle makes it a hobby OS.
I'm trying to publicize the push for a specifically desktop version of what CentOS does for servers, with more of the desktop stuff which tends to show up in SUSE. As it is, I have to add a lot of stuff to CentOS, but it's worth it for the support of the underlying system, with timely security and bug fix updates.
Taking It One Step Further
Coming very late to the game, I have truly enjoyed the debate here. Thank, you Dag, for addressing this issue (not to mention a thousand other thanks I owe you as a long time user of your packages). I'm running CentOS for the reasons outlined -- five+ years of support for the same product. Further, if there was a SLED version of the same, I would probably switch in a heartbeat. The sticking point remains the steady stream of security update and bug fix SRPMs from Novell. Annual service packs won't do it. I'd build them myself without a supporting distro organization. Were they available, not only would I be running that cloned SLED right now, I'd be offering it to all my clients as their best alternative to that monopoly OS. Less than a five-year cycle makes it a hobby OS.
I'm trying to publicize the push for a specifically desktop version of what CentOS does for servers, with more of the desktop stuff which tends to show up in SUSE. As it is, I have to add a lot of stuff to CentOS, but it's worth it for the support of the underlying system, with timely security and bug fix updates.