On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 23:26, James Drabb wrote:
> I know it sounds like I am coming down on Red Hat, though I do want to > state that I have used RH Linux for a long time now and find it the best > Linux distro to use. I just am not happy how RH dumped the home user > and the small business user.
It really must be me, I guess. I seem to be the only one who doesn't see this whole thing as RH "dumping" the home or small business user. I guess I've been at this to long or something.
Joe: No, I have come to believe that most of us out here have a clue. However, there are still hundreds or thousands of people who Just Don't Get It [tm]. They will or they won't, but you'll have a hard time convincing them.
> Now What IT manager is going to ever choose to use Fedora. What small > business is ever going to choose to use Fedora with statements like the > above. To me it sounds like RHEL is secure and stable while Fedora is > not.
James: To me it sounds like Fedora has software freedom, costs $0.00, and its security and stability will, over the long haul, be determined by the community of developers, programmers, and users involved with it. That can go well or poorly, but it DOES NOT automatically imply "poorly." That same RHEL you suggest as secure and stable was built mostly by the same community, and most of the packages in Fedora are the very same packages in RHEL... they are just newer versions.
Fedora moves forward more quickly than RHEL, thus of course over the long haul an RHEL version with 24 months of use behind it will be more stable than a current/recent Fedora version. However: telling me that a McLaren F1 Formular racecar is faster than a BMW M5, while true, will not convince me that the M5 is slow. You are talking differential or marginal security/stability, not absolute.
Hence the argument falls completely apart on a philosophical basis, and can be discarded.
On a practical level, I have now had a couple of Fedora boxes running stock installs (and updates) as firewall/gateway machines for small businesses. I performed exactly the same lock-down measures which I did on RHL-9 and which I would need to perform on RHEL-3. Exactly the same. Both boxen have now been online 24/7 for 30 days with no crashes, no bugs, no problems, and no cracks. While this may not be a perfect test, no Windows computer I ever met could say the same.
Hence your argument can further be shown to have no practical merits.
> Also, RH no longer has a Linux available that is cost effective compared > to MS. You can get MS Windows XP home for $99, while Red Hat > Professional Workstation is around $110.
Is that XP Home a full version of the OS, or an upgrade? Also note that I just bought an RHPW box for $50 or so. Get your facts straight.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
