Submitted by John Duperon (not verified) on Mon, 2008/05/19 - 15:28.
Hi Dag and others,
I completely understand your viewpoint and where you are coming from. You don't want Redhat to invest a lot of money on kernel drivers and for Ubuntu to simply come along and benefit from it, even potentially taking market share away as it does so. That's not fair.
However, your comment about a new install taking a whole day surprises me and shows that you may have other things to worry about. In our company, we use Ubuntu for everything simply because it's a release that doesn't take a day to install. Updates also work _extremely_ well. I know on my desktop with Hardy Heron I typically update my machine once a week or every few days, depending on how serious the updates are. It usually takes about 5 minutes and I've got all the security patches and latest bug fixes. When updates are that easy, it tends to happen more often. Server updates are also easy and "just work". Because our staff are familiar with Ubuntu from the desktop and updates are so easy, we decided to use Ubuntu for all of our servers. We haven't regretted that decision in the slightest.
Now, if other people have the same experiences we've had, RedHat may have to rethink its strategy a bit, focusing more on the desktop and easy package management. Otherwise, it will lose market share to Ubuntu and will have less money to contribute to the kernel we all love. To that end, I would propose RedHat switch to apt and use as much of Canonicals packaging technology as possible. There is no reason that RedHat can't benefit from Canonicals work as Canonical has benefited from Redhat's. It may, in fact, be necessary.
We use Ubuntu for everything
Hi Dag and others,
I completely understand your viewpoint and where you are coming from. You don't want Redhat to invest a lot of money on kernel drivers and for Ubuntu to simply come along and benefit from it, even potentially taking market share away as it does so. That's not fair.
However, your comment about a new install taking a whole day surprises me and shows that you may have other things to worry about. In our company, we use Ubuntu for everything simply because it's a release that doesn't take a day to install. Updates also work _extremely_ well. I know on my desktop with Hardy Heron I typically update my machine once a week or every few days, depending on how serious the updates are. It usually takes about 5 minutes and I've got all the security patches and latest bug fixes. When updates are that easy, it tends to happen more often. Server updates are also easy and "just work". Because our staff are familiar with Ubuntu from the desktop and updates are so easy, we decided to use Ubuntu for all of our servers. We haven't regretted that decision in the slightest.
Now, if other people have the same experiences we've had, RedHat may have to rethink its strategy a bit, focusing more on the desktop and easy package management. Otherwise, it will lose market share to Ubuntu and will have less money to contribute to the kernel we all love. To that end, I would propose RedHat switch to apt and use as much of Canonicals packaging technology as possible. There is no reason that RedHat can't benefit from Canonicals work as Canonical has benefited from Redhat's. It may, in fact, be necessary.