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Legacy inadequacy

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 17:37 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Legacy inadequacy by bojan
Parent article: Big decisions loom for Fedora

I don't agree. I have seen lots of complaints about volatility of Fedora. CentOS on the desktop is probably not a good choice; OTOH Fedora's forced upgrades are not nice.

I use Ubuntu 6.04; 6.10 is already out there, but my current desktop is working fine, so why change it? When I feel like it (or need it) I will take the time to upgrade; meanwhile I appreciate the support provided by Canonical, in this case (LTS version) exceptionally long. I would expect Fedora users to feel more or less the same; otherwise why would anyone have started the Legacy project?


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Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:20 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Obviously people that think that Fedora's forced upgrades are not nice, like yourself (and there is nothing wrong with that - I'm just making an observation), already picked another distro, which is about 3 orders of magnitude easier than maintaining Fedora Legacy.

Initially, people thought that FL will be the answer to what RHL used to be. In order words a free, "forever" maintained, recent, Red Hat flavoured distro. It turned out that the intersection of:

- has to be Red Hat flavoured
- has to be free
- has to have updates coming
- has to be more recent than RHELx

Didn't have that many interested users/developers. Therefore, people picked different distros, including CentOS, FC, Ubuntu, Debian etc. And FL ended up being unmaintained after this initial reaction to FC/RHEL split cleared up.

Granted, there is still occasional "don't keep changing so fast" on various Fedora lists, but most people understand by now that the Fedora is life in a fast lane.

And once RHEL5 gets released and CentOS 5 gets built, the current level of interest in FL will drop by a few notches again. It's just a natural reaction to the fact that there is no point in doing the hard work that someone already did.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:57 UTC (Tue) by sbishop (subscriber, #33061) [Link]

Exactly. Thank you, bojan. That's exactly what I was getting at in my initial post.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 19, 2006 19:55 UTC (Sun) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

Actually, CentOS is fine for the desktop. Since it's released every 18 months you may want to check for hardware compatibility or delay until the next release to support recent hardware.

But CentOS 4 as a desktop is perfect for anyone except maybe technical people that desire to have the latest and greatest technology.

For everyone else, stability, reliability, low maintenance, low-risk non-disruptive updates and long term support (7 years) is exactly what one needs.

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