OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Jonathan E. Brickman]

Timothy Butler wrote:
>>
>> I've voiced in the past my disgust with the "rolling release" concept. I
>> don't want the latest and greatest. Sometimes a new feature is
>> compelling, but for me that's quite rare. Once I get all my hardware
>> working, I want to leave things as they are for awhile. I like bug fixes
>> and patches; I don't like dropping support just about the time I get
>> used to what I have.
>
>     That's why I like RHEL so much (presumably CentOS would be the 
> same, since only differs in minor ways). You can run the same RHEL 
> release for over half a decade. They offer security updates, but they 
> backport those to the same software versions that came with the 
> system, that way features don't shift around when just trying to keep 
> the system stable and secure.
>
>     It'd be nice if someone tried to make a Linux distro that was 
> desktop oriented that had a similar release schedule to Mac OS X. 
> These days Linux is mature enough that one does not really need the 
> new desktop environment version every six months. Just keeping driver 
> support up-to-date could easily keep a well polished, well supported 
> distro running for eighteen to twenty four months.
>
>     -Tim
I will be very interested to see how Linux Mint does.  I installed it 
for the first time about a week ago, and its driver, WWW, and 
application support has been best of all of Ubuntu, Mepis, pure Debian, 
CentOS, a few Slackware variants, Mandriva, and a number of others over 
the last year.  Reportedly it's not Ubuntu-based anymore, merely 
Ubuntu-compatible, which is pretty neat:  I tested it recently with 
truecrypt (often a distro difficulty) and it came through with flying 
colors, and so far I have run into exactly none (!!!!!) of the Ubuntu 
buglets I'm used to hacking through, like sound card and WWW stuff.  
It's also been the fastest of all of them, which is quite surprising, 
Mepis was very fast.

J.E.B.