Redhat 7.x and 8.x sunset

[lug at the-leveys.us (Don Levey)]

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-admin at blu.org [mailto:discuss-admin at blu.org]On Behalf Of
David Kramer
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 11:14 PM
To: discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Redhat 7.x and 8.x sunset


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?

---> I'm a home user, hoping to do some work and learning at home.  This
could involve quite a number of additional packages, some programming,
certainly web, ssh and mail services, as well as some multi-media.


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'm running RH9 on my play machine and server, as well as my wife's
laptop.  Due to the EOL, I decided to look at other distros, including
Debian, Gentoo, Vector, Mandrake, Fedore, SuSE and I think something else
but I can't recall right now.  I'm not much of a capable hacker, so jumping
through hoops and reading volumes in hopes of finding obscure bits of lore
are somewhat beyond me right now.  The ones that I narrowed down to were
Mandrake and Fedora.

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.

---> SuSE getting bought *might* be a good thing.  The info you mention
about Mandrake does not leave me with as much confidence as I'd like; they
were only one of two that I was actually able to get running with any degree
of facility and function.  I have hopes for Fedora - at least they seem on t
heir way up instead of down, and on the machines I've tried it does seem to
work.

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.

---> I don't mind a nominal fee to get some "extras" - but as a home user I
don't have, and am not willing to spend, corporate-level prices to get a
working OS. I'd be happy to stay with RH9, if I could know that updates and
notifications would still happen.  The up2date utility is half of the
equation; I like the clearing-house concept for information and bulletins.
Since this is not my full-time job (and if it were, I shouldn't have to
spend full-time on it anyway), I can't spend houre upon hours scanning
different sources in the hopes that one will have info about patches I need.

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.

---> Didn't know about that one; thanks!

- 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'm wondering if the two markets were diverging, as far as the effort
(shared or not) that they needed to invest.  Geeks may have been their
evangelists, but as a company they need the money to stay afloat.  HOw much
money is there in giving stuff away for free?  I think it may have been a
mistake, but I'm not sure that other options would have been better for
them.

 -Don