[OT] Linux distributions

[Bill Davidsen]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> This is very off-topic, I know, but we just went through this decision
> process at Stanford and I have pretty strong opinions about it.
> 
> Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Didn't realize they had an enterprise release... or any supported
>>release. The justification for RHEL is 7x24 support and backported
>>bug/security fixes for five years (rather than having to go to new
>>versions).
> 
> 
> Debian's security fixes are considerably better than RHEL's in my
> experience.  The time frame in practice right now is at least two years,
> which is long enough for us, but may not be long enough for other people.
> Debian is *excellent* about only fixing the security vulnerability and not
> making you upgrade to a new version.
> 
> Plus, even if you do have to go to a new version of Debian because two
> years wasn't enough time, note that, unlike with Red Hat, Debian's stable
> upgrades actually work and generally don't break things.
> 
> We recently went through a pretty extensive review internally, and our
> conclusion is that we got better support from Debian for free than we got
> from Red Hat paying for RHEL.  Our experience with Red Hat's technical
> support is absolutely horrendous; we got significantly better software
> support from Sun, and that's saying something.  Having 24x7 commercial
> support doesn't mean much when the commercial support is worthless.
> 
> There's also the fact that Debian is simply a better distribution in
> pretty much every respect, technologically, stability-wise, and
> configuration-wise, than Red Hat.  Not to mention that Red Hat keeps doing
> idiotic things, like putting init scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d or putting
> Kerberos headers in /usr/kerberos/include instead of /usr/include where
> they belong.
> 
> The only reason why we run Red Hat on anything is that there are
> occasional vendor applications (Oracle) where the vendor won't talk to you
> unless you run Red Hat.  Everything else is going to Debian.
> 
> That being said, INN should work fine on either.  :)  (Debian's native INN
> packages are far superior to Red Hat's, though, based on prior discussion
> on the list.)
> 
To say that the Redhat build of INN doesn't suit my needs would be 
putting it mildly. The uninstall didn't work either.
-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen at tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me