Giving up on Linux...

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 03:57, James Drabb wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 10:28, xyzzy at hotpop.com wrote:
> > Well, these particular issues (SMP system lockup, etc...) are all over 
> > Bugzilla with nary a fix in sight after quite a long time.  I also HAVE 
> > posted here with my problem and got redirected to these same bug reports.
> 
> You do know that Fedora is meant more as a development playground?  It
> is not built to be your average stable Linux.

This is not quite so ;-). Fedora Core is not intended as a "development
playground", the goal is that it is at least as stable as Red Hat Linux
(was). What makes it a bit hard to use in data centers is the relatively
short lifespan and the lack of support you can buy from Red Hat. Of
course nothing stops someone else than the company called Red Hat to
extend the life span (Fedora Legacy) or to sell support for Fedora Core
or Legacy. Granted that you can't just go into "ye olde electronicque
shoppe" around the corner, order to "just give me something
cheap/fast/shiny" without looking beforehand whether it works with
Linux. But you will find that you cannot do that with RHEL and still be
supported ;-).

> Why not try something a little more stable for your home system if you
> don't want to tinker?  Try Red Hat Workstation or SuSE.

As I said, I don't think stability is the main issue (when carefully
choosing your hardware), you'd rather ask yourself whether you need a
company bound by contract to support you or whether regular updates and
a community of random people are sufficient for you. Mind you that with
MS Windows you don't seem to get any more than the latter either.

> As a kernel hacker, why not try to learn the Linux kernel and help
> improve things?  Help test Fedora, send in patches, be a part of a
> community.  With MS Windows, there is no community.

Also not really the case, you need some type of a community when using
Windows as a private person, otherwise you're lost when problems occur.
Naturally this community is quite different from what we're used to, for
starters, they're a lot less empowered than we are. They usually don't
have the source code and are limited to best effort workarounds in many
cases instead of really tracing a problem back to its origin.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
 PGP fingerprint:  C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20040223/3dbecd50/attachment-0001.sig>