[Lvlug] Recommendations on a More Suitable Distro

[Patrick Bartek]

--- On Sun, 3/21/10, High Mobley <high.mobley at qbangsolutions.com> wrote:

> I'm not aware of any (free) Linux
> with 5-year support cycles.  You

Neither am I, but I can dream.  CentOS (and probably Scientific Linux, too) have free support (bug and security) for about 4 years.

> might consider RHEL.  I would expect that they provide
> long term
> support.  Debian is the best candidate I know of if
> you want long term
> support on a Linux distro.  In fact, if you start with
> a version of
> TESTING that has been available for 9 to 12 months, you can
> squeeze
> almost 5 years of support out of that Debian release as it
> progresses
> to STABLE.  And Debian's TESTING version has always
> been as solid as
> all the other distros' stable releases for me.

I've used Debian in the past (Sarge & Etch), but only as Stable.  Never considered Testing.  Figured it was beta-ware, at best.  Official support is 3 years for Stable releases.  Not too bad.

> You might also want to consider some of the BSD
> variants.  I haven't
> worked with them closely for a while, but I suspect that
> FreeBSD is
> more likely to have long term support for their releases
> than OpenBSD
> or NetBSD.

Have only thought of BSD for server use--no GUI--which is its forte.  Never considered it for general use, desktop computing.  But it's been several years since I looked.

Thanks for the input.

B