Can Linux beat XP in homes yet or NOT?

[Tim]

Les Mikesell:
>>> I'd give Centos 3.x a try on old machines.

Tim: 
>> I'm curious why you'd say as old as 3?  Are the releases, since then,
>> that much more demanding of resources?

Les Mikesell: 
> Support for some older hardware has been dropped,

Hmm, interesting, and potentially annoying.  I like being able to keep
older hardware running, so it's not landfill.  It also, often, has lower
power requirements than current stuff.  Not to mention avoiding spending
yet more money on yet more hardware...

> You can still expect Centos3 to run for years and everything a server 
> needs already works on it - dovecot being a possible exception since it 
> was a pre-release version.  If you run it you might want to grab a newer 
> src rpm and rebuild it.  You probably wouldn't want it on a desktop 
> since desktop apps are still improving and 'enterprise' distributions 
> only get bug/security fix updates, not new app versions or features.

I've been dabbling with CentOS 5, to replace my LAN mail server running
Dovecot on FC4.  So far, it seems quite okay to me.  At this stage, I'm
just duplicating and testing, rather than swapping it in.

I'd also tried it as a desktop, most things I want to try work.  I
generally don't do much beyond basic internet stuff.  CentOS 5 seems
somewhere between FC5 and FC6, to me.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ rm -rfd /*^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Huname -ipr
2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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