Redhat 7.x and 8.x sunset

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Tuesday 23 December 2003 9:18 pm, Bill Horne wrote:
> TWIMC,
>
> With the sunset for Redhat 7.x and 8.x just a few days away,
> I'd like a to do a straw poll: if you're using 7.x or 8.x, or
> have already switched to something else, please respond and
> tell the list your choice and the reason(s) for it.

(Preface 1: you should state what kind of user and purpose you are asking 
about: commercial?  Home user?  Enterprise?

Preface 2: For those of you who were absent that day, I had a RHAT 7.3 system, 
which I was looking to upgrade to get the latest KDE, and a bunch of other 
applications, as well as better USB and DVD support.  A few weeks before I 
was planning to do it, my hard drive died, and I was forced to do the upgrade 
before I was prepared. Tried SuSE 8.2, had several pages of notes on the 
failures.  See the archives for details.  Upgraded to 9.0, some things got 
better, but major systemic problems.  Did a fresh SuSE 9.0 professional 
install, and it was much better, but to this day I still can't get major 
mandatory functionality working on my box after about a month of banging my 
head against it till the wee hours in the morning.  Talked to several others 
with similar experiences, and decided SuSE is a great distro for light home 
users, but not heavy power users doing interesting mixes of applications and 
servers.)

I've lamented on this subject ad nauseum.  The perfect storm of RHAT EOLing 
the personal user, SuSE being such a nightmare of an install for myself and 
several others I know, along with them getting bought up, Mandrake in deep 
finacial guano, and the fact that they are modifying stuff they shouldn't in 
the system as much as RHAT does now, Gentoo looking promising but not quite 
there yet for most production purposes, Fedora Core 1 being a good start but 
not ready yet either, and Debian stuck in years-old technology, leaves me no 
good options.

Commercial users can still buy RHEL, and many commercial users would be just 
as happy with a distribution based on older releases that have security 
patches to them, but the home power user like myself is left high and dry.  
heck, I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount of money (I already laid out 
over $100 between the SuSE 8.2 to 9.0 upgrade abd the 9.0 Pro full install).  
But there simply is no distro out there that suits my needs anymore.

Side notes:
- I have done a TON of research on this.  I spent three weeks just picking the 
distro when I went with SuSE.  I've read countless reviews.  I've studied 
http://www.distrowatch.org, and all it has done is backed up my 
aforementioned assertion.

- I know several people who used to work at RHAT, and all believe that it has 
been RHAT's intention to move away from the home user ever since they went 
public.  They have supported that with enough evidence that I believe them.  
I also think it's a grave error, since the personal userbase is what got the 
geeks loving RHAT, and pushing (or sneaking) it into the workplace.  Maybe 
RHAT feels that they have big partners like IBM and Oracle they don't need 
the geeks anymore.

- I am not the typical home user or the typical corporate user.  I run a HELL 
of a lot of stuff on my box.  On the other hand, I do not make one attempg to 
get something working then give up; I'm very persistent.  Weight my opinion 
as you see fit based on that.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD  "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any 
DKK D  invention in human history--with the possible exceptions
DK KD  of handguns and tequila."                     Mitch Ratliffe
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