Laurie Brown wrote:
All of the above and a whole lot more is why I've left the fluffy world of SuSE behind and gone over to Gentoo. It's also why I installed RH once a few years ago, and never went near it again. IMO all the major distros are fast making many of the same mistakes that MS made with windows. Luckily, they have something decent underneath it all, but even so, IT professionals are finding that the major distros are making their jobs harder and harder by chasing the numpty market the way they are.
In my industry we have little choice over what distros we can use, simply because when you purchase expensive things like Maya or Pixar's Renderman, you're tied to what they support and both these products will only support Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 at the time of writing. People have tried Debian with RenderMan only to have been told that it's not supported in any way shape or form. Of course, it's not just the industry that I work in that has this problem. I'm sure that most commercial Linux software imposes limits on what distros are supported. Red Hat is going to be the closest you're going to get as a "corporate desktop" and consequently the big boys will only support it.
As for RedHat 8 and 9, own opinions on it is that 8 was full of bugs and I couldn't work with it and 9 is an improvement but perhaps a little too late. It works, but it's still very resource hungry. I also don't like some of the default installation choices - why will they not include 'lynx' as an essential install? Why must everything be graphical?
Using Debian or Gentoo may mena it takes longer to build the "Corporate Desktop" or server platform, but once it's done, consistent roll-outs are a piece of cake, and subsequent management much easier.
Absolutely in agreement here :)
Regards,
Martyn