[Lvlug] Recommendations on a More Suitable Distro

[Patrick Bartek]

--- On Sun, 3/21/10, heath petty <hpetty1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to preference my comments with
> the general observation that
> things move quickly in the open source world. This is why
> Fedora is on
> a 6 month release cycle. There are enough interesting and
> compelling
> new features to justify this short release cycle.

This is why I'm looking for a less cutting edge release.  I want longevity as long as the OS does what I need it to do.  Although, a five year support window is probably hoping for too much.  I'll be satisfied with 3 years or so:  Twice what I'm getting with Fedora.

> Don't count RHEL and derivatives out just yet. While its
> true that the
> 5.0 RHEL release was based on FC 6, we are currently in
> beta for 5.5.
> Many new features are being back-ported, and some desktop
> apps are
> getting re-based (OpenOffice 3.0 for example). If you
> really want a 5
> year support cycle then you'll really need to consider a
> distro
> designed for long term support. Centos or Scientific Linux
> [snip]

I'm keeping a weather eye on the doings a Red Hat.  CentOS or SL would be perfect, if the source code were more contemporary.  However, if RHEL follows tradition, 6 will be based on Fedora 9 or 10.  Of course, since you work for Red Hat, you know better than I the source code being used.  Can you give any hints without risking your job?

> The only other two options I can think of besides Debian,
> is Ubuntu
> LTS, or SLES. I don't think there are any free rebuilds of
> SLES, just
> the OpenSuSE project, which has similar goals to the Fedora
> project.

Was perusing SuSE's site last night.  OpenSuSE is the only free release, but like Fedora/RHEL, it is used as development releases for the commercial, for pay SuSE, if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks for the advice.

B