Upgrade is (often) a useless timewaster [LWN.net]

Upgrade is (often) a useless timewaster

Posted Nov 27, 2008 21:19 UTC (Thu) by dag- (subscriber, #30207)
In reply to: Upgrade is risky by NAR
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Asian Tour

Go for an Enterprise Linux (RHEL, SLES, CentOS) and use your Linux distribution for up to 7 years without needing to replace everything every 6 to 12 months...

If it works and it is important that it keeps working, don't change it. If you want to experiment, do it on another box or virtualized.

Sure some people want or need the latest and greatest software, and they can bear the suffering (or even spend the time fixing and sending upstream). But there is no point asking the same from the 99% of non-technical users for whom computers are a means, and not the goal.

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Upgrade is (often) a useless timewaster

Posted Nov 28, 2008 12:14 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Unfortunately I've seen some of those enterprise and long-term-support Linuxes and the "if it works" condition didn't really hold, e.g. gaim crashed if it wanted to play any sound, youtube didn't work, etc.

In one sense the Linux distribution model is great, because one can get all software from one place and they (are supposed to) work well together. On the other hand applications are sometimes too thightly coupled together, if one needs a new version (to fix a bug) of an application, due to dependency issues a whole lot of other applications have to be updated (which is bound to introduce new bugs). I mean I don't think that a new Winamp on Windows will ever make me install a new MSN, but I'm not that sure about a new audacious bringing on a new pidgin. It's hard enough to make one application relatively bugfree, but it's much harder to do it with a whole distribution.

Anyway, it's just ranting...