On Sat, 27 Sep 2014, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 26 September 2014 13:14, James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com wrote:
On 26 September 2014 11:25, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote: Main distros are best regarding support. Six month upgrades I've got fed up with and found an annual upgrade about right for my uses. i dislike the attitude with 6 month releases - stick out 20th of the release month whatever... Ubuntu has been bad sometimes and Fedora 18 or 19 wouldn't even load from CD. ubuntu now only do updates for 9 months so one cannot miss out a release.... use LTS you may say - I found bugs in 12.04 which weren't sorted.
I've pretty much standardised on LTS for anything other than personal deskop/laptop and haven't really had any problems.
Since I have pretty much decided to stick with .deb package management (because it's what I know and there doesn't seem anything better) that limits my choices really to Debian, Ubuntu and Mint. As far as Mint is concerned their decision not to support in-place upgrades has ruled that out (LMDE would be fine as a rolling distro though, one day I'll probably try that). This is the thing about .deb package management: I've had cause to do some pretty rough things with it (like upgrade Ubuntu versions skipping one or two releases because it's been left until the intermediate releases have ceased to be available) and although I've had problems it's generally been OK (and usually we're talking virtual machines which are easy to backup and roll-back if it goes wrong). I just don't have that kind of faith in .rpm.
I've learned to get used to Unity now (and I find KDE annoying more than I expected) so I think that determines my direction, but if it weren't for their use of rpm I'd have given Fedora (and maybe SuSE) much more of a chance. But isn't it great to have a choice!
-- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
In place upgrades is something I've not done as... from what I've read it's not recommended. So if you've had no few problems all I can say is you are lucky. I've always installed from CD/DVD live; doing the gparted disk check first and then installing. Most of the posts on ubuntu forum and mailing list is because people haven't done an md5sum/sha256sum check on an iso burn or upgrade. The 12.04 to 14.04 seems to have lots of problems.
"But isn't it great to have a choice!" But the choice isn't so great. Each distro has it's problems. I'd like a slackware based one as the modular system is more stable than deb or rpm. I don't think there's a great difference between the two.
james