Dumping Windows

[John Summerfield]

Joel Rees wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>> You really should not be using Fedora for serious work.
> 
> 
> I'd say that depends on the nature of the work, the users, and the 
> extent of reflex tendencies to yum every morning.
> 
> In my case, I've been using it for web-site and Java (Netbeans) 
> development with no particular problems.


You are not maintaining 1300 users. A single competent user doesn't meet 
  the description, "serious." "Serious" means your business depends on it.

> 
> Noting that I'm going to try the latest SUSE from Novell as soon as I 
> can, I'll suggest two or three things --
> 
> One is that having a lot of ordinary users helping find the bugs in FC 
> (or any of the dev distros) is a good thing, although it is even better 
> if you get permission from management and at least verbal agreement from 
> the users.

If the job description of the 1300 users includes "testing Linux," then 
fine. Otherwise, it's a tool that does a job and that is _all_ it should do.

If _your_ box fails after a kernel upgrade, it will take you a few 
minutes (typically) to fix the problem.

If _you_ stuff up 1300 users machines, it's going to take quite a deal 
more than a few minutes to fix, and it will come to the attention of the 
board of directors, I promise.

You will have pointed out to you the cost of having 1300 employees 
without their computers, how enterprise communications require those 
computers to be working, how orders for goods could not be taken, etc, 
in nauseating detail, and you will be advised to seek alternative 
employment soonest, preferably in a career devoid of computers and 
responsibility because YOU HAVE FAILED.

I had a chat back about '82 with some folk from a bank whose ATM network 
was down for a couple of days after a software upgrade failed. The 
members of the board individually and the board as a whole were not amused.


> 
> The other is that, any OS you run, you should have staging boxes to 
> check patches, updates, and application compatibility on some of the 
> more patient users before you deploy them across the user base. 
> MSWindows is no exception to this rule.

I'm sure someone administering 1300 users understands those things. 
Still, you don't want those nasty surprises when the software breaks. 
You want software that "just works" all the time, and Fedora Core doesn't,