Fedora target audience, what about the research area? (was Re: Leaving?)

[Jeremy Sanders]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> Jesse Keating <jkeating <at> redhat.com> writes:
>> Those firms would have been much better off using a (free) enterprise minded
>> distribution.  Backported fixes, low churn, 5+ years of maintenance, etc...
>
> Scientific Linux for example. This has been put together by CERN and Fermilab,
> and is used in several research institutions. And it's a rebuild of RHEL's
> SRPMs, just like CentOS (which is also an option).

As someone who helps choose a distribution for science work, it's very 
hard. Fedora moves so fast and updates so often that you cannot base 
anything stable on it, and the admin spends his life running around fixing 
things. I assume the only target audience for Fedora are hobbyists.

RHEL/CentOS/SciLinux move so slowly (particularly now that RH have slowed 
down the major release rate) that you end up with an ancient kernel that 
does not support the USB stuff scientists want or latest chipsets, an 
X.org which doesn't support the only graphics card you can buy (without 
nonfree drivers), and an archaic Python which doesn't run the software you 
want.

Such is life (any distribution suggestions welcome :-) (SL at work, 
Fedora at home)... I think this post is offtopic enough now.

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Sanders <jss at ast.cam.ac.uk>   http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/
X-Ray Group, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK.
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