free "enterprise" Linux distro [LWN.net]

free "enterprise" Linux distro

Posted Oct 9, 2003 14:20 UTC (Thu) by snitm (subscriber, #4031)
In reply to: free "enterprise" Linux distro by tomsi
Parent article: An Evening with Bruce Perens

with regard to debian stable needing to be more up-to-date (I agree); but I'd imagine that debian's _unstable_ is likely more stable than alot of what we'll see from RHEL3.0 in the initial release. RedHat hasn't won me over with their distribution quality/stability. That said, I hope I'm pleasantly surprised with RHEL3.0 because ultimately I'm forced to support it ;)

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free "enterprise" Linux distro

Posted Oct 9, 2003 22:01 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Even Debian unstable is rather backward compared to the leading GNU/Linux distributions. It has Gnome 2.2 (not 2.4), Xfree86 4.2.1 (not 4.3), etc. At least KDE is only one point release behind, and KDE 3.1.4 only shipped in September so this is good. But given the lengthy process to get a release out, I fear that sarge will be a year behind the competition on the day it ships. Debian seems to do very well with packages that don't have complex dependencies, packaging nearly everything under the sun. But they seem to be having far more trouble with X and the big desktops.

Now, Debian labors under some handicaps: the fact that they support 11 architectures often means that they have to make packages work on oddball hardware that the upstream developers haven't seen.