Matej Cepl wrote:
On 2007-05-29, 18:55 GMT, Les Mikesell wrote:
[...], but I wish there were something that used the same
packaging and admin techniques that would make a usable desktop
On that note. Couple of people asked me (or are going to ask me
soon) to install Linux on their desktop. People who are computer
savvy to some degree (or not that much savvy in one case -- but
the lady has learned Red Hat first in times when it was still Red
Hat, and then she got Windows with the new computer, and now she
goes around and notalgically remembers about beautfy of that Red
Hat icons which was welcoming her on login, and hates
unfriendliness of Windows ;-) -- and she is really not computer
geek; sorry, I digress).
Being now a Red Hat employee, I would love to install them some
Red Hat related distro, but I am not sure which one. Of course,
they wouldn't like to shell out big bucks (especially considering
CZK-USD exhange rate) on RH Desktop. However, I wouldn't feel
happy to install them Fedora with 13 (or how many) months of
guaranteed support. So, I was thinking lately about installing
them CentOS as a desktop.
Is it good idea? Does anybody have any experience with using
CentOS on desktop, which is primarily used to do something else
than developing Linux? Any other ideas?
Today, Centos5 would be a very reasonable desktop choice since it was
just released and is almost exactly that end-of-life FC6 but with
continued updates that I said earlier that I wanted. But, a year and a
half from now - or whenever faster-moving distros have shipped a newer
Evolution, Firefox, OO, etc., it may start to look old and stale because
the apps don't get new-feature updates within the release lifetime.
The nature of the fedora/RHEL split is that if you want new app features
you have to accept the experimental kernels and device drivers that come
bundled with them in fedora. There is also some odd issue with Sun java
vs. the packaged java items in the Centos5 base repository that might or
might not be a problem for you. I think this is inherited from RHEL5
and has something to do with rebuilding jars during package installs.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
