Sudden enlightenment :-)
Have you noticed how many people are still using Windows XP (released in 2001), or even Windows 2000 in some places? Do you remember for how many years was Windows 98 used?
People who use a particular release of Windows (i.e. "2000" or "XP") are using a practically unchanged OS for many years, they are only patching it, and they only upgrading the applications to newer versions, e.g. Office 97 -> Office 2000 -> Office XP (2002) -> Office 2003 -> Office 2007. This is also valid for corporate use.
In contrast, corporate users of a particular release of "enterprise Linux" (e.g. "RHEL4" or "RHEL5") are not only stuck with an unchanged base system for years, but they are also forced to stick with a fixed version of the applications, who can only accept security and other critical patches. For instance, RHEL4 users can only have OpenOffice.org 1.1.x and GIMP 2.0.x, RHEL5 users can only have OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 and GIMP 2.2.x, and neither of them can have Firefox 2.0.0.x, nor GIMP 2.4! Once you install packages from source, or statically-linked binaries, you're out of the "enterprise-style" Linux.
The solution of benefiting of newer application packages by using a Linux distro that releases "often", usually twice a year (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva), has the disadvantage of having it supported through patches only for shorter periods, say 12...18 months. These kind of distros are also buggier than "enterprise" distros. Not to mention that installing or upgrading twice a year can be risky, or sometimes impossible.
What would I actually need?The best choice would be a distro that keeps the base system unchanged (but patched) for years, while providing applications with several versions, so you could choose between the known stability and compatibility of an older version, or the features and improvements of a newer version!
NOTE: Although GNOME and KDE are not quite "base", we can take them for "base" with regards to an enterprise Linux distro. I can accept to use GNOME 2.8 with RHEL4, but I would very much like an official build of a newer GIMP and a newer Firefox! And so on...
Building from sources is not a solution, but only a compromise.
Using a "rolling-release distro" (such as Arch Linux) is not a solution either, as the risk of system breakage is elevated. This might not matter very much for a home user... but even a home user may have moments when the "system availability" is close to the enterprise-style of "business continuity" needs! You can't afford very often to have a non-functional system because of a regular system update, can you?
Using a "source distro" (such as Gentoo, Lunar, CRUX, Source Mage, ROCK Linux, etc.) is even less suitable for regular mass usage or for corporate usage. It can break at any moment, and you can't afford to "just don't touch it", because you're supposed to apply some patches, right?
One might argue that what I need is a BSD flavor. Indeed, any BSD comprises a "base system", and all the extra software is either built from source ("ports" or "pkgsrc"), or available as binary packages for most of the time.
The BSD systems have some specific disadvantages though. For instance, say you installed FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE end-January 2007, short after it was released. It came with Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox-2.0.r2. As Firefox is regularly patched, you will need to upgrade to a newer Firefox. Say you are in May 2007, and you try to retrieve the security-patched FreeBSD binary packages for Firefox 1.5.0.11 or Firefox 2.0.0.3 (any of them the latest for the respective branch at the time).
Unfortunately, you can't do that, as maybe 75% of the binary packages are now built against X.org 7.2 instead of X.org 6.9. Therefore, even for the sake of a single application, you should upgrade your system from X.org 6.9 to X.org 7.2!
This is not acceptable, a few months after RELEASE. It induces high risks of system breakage: imagine upgrading all the systems in a company, having several hardware components, to a completely new X.org release, and all this... for what?
For they say "packages are not branched". Lame excuse, and structural defective by design. (Yes, and I had a FreeBSD committer calling me names and making me idiot.)
Also, when a security patch is released, the BSD land rule is to release source patches (diffs). While I can appreciate that in the F/LOSS world I can have the full sources and I can build from sources, it is unacceptable to be forced to build from sources just for applying the latest patch!
Serious Linux distros, as well as other operating systems (from Windows to Solaris)... do release binary updates. Yup. We're in 2007, should you have not noticed, and online updates were available for years in both (say) RHEL and Windows. Hey, you can even have an update applet in "small" distros like KateOS!
Not to say that OpenBSD releases exactly at 6 months. You can run a given release for 12 months, or you can choose to upgrade twice a year. Which one is the best choice?
None of them is tempting enough, and it's still hard to say that OpenBSD should be the #1 choice for enterprise laptops, desktops and servers altogether. Maybe at a later time.
Looking with a certain benevolence, we might believe that NetBSD has a better model. As BSD as it is, the base system is stable for a longer period of time (and believe me, I am even happy with its XFree86 that is part of the base system!), and pkgsrc has a quarterly release model, which is an interesting compromise. On a quarterly basis, some applications are upgraded to newer versions, but important stuff like X.org doesn't change brutally that often. Binary packages are usually available for your convenience.
Yet, anything BSD still has some concepts that are only appropriate for the very enthusiasts.
For instance, I stopped building custom Linux kernels at the beginning of 2005. I guess I was on Slackware 10.1. Since then, I decided that being able to do it is important, but it's equally important not to need to do it! Nowadays, a kernel is much more complex than it was 10-12 years ago, and most people should stick to what their distro is offering to them. Yes, this includes automatically retrieving security-updated and bug-fixed kernel binaries...
But in the BSD land, the canonical "make buildworld ; make buildkernel ; make installkernel ; reboot" is still... umm... current news, eh?
So it looks like Linux is nevertheless the best all-purpose OS, both for enterprise use and regular home use, and also for enthusiastic experiments, it's just you can't really find what you need, no matter how vast the choice might seem! For a non-enthusiastic home user having the stability and availability requirements of an enterprise distro, but being pissed off while using Firefox 1.5, what is to be done? What I have described at the fifth bullet... doesn't exist!
Dunno. Maybe a good idea would be to sing Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise...
8 commentsPaying for SLED is like sending your wife to the brothel...
>>Paying for SLED is like sending your wife to the brothel...
Unless you then put all the source code in a public repository and become Robin Hood :-)
> Unless you then put all the source code in a public repository
Is the full source code for SLED/SLES publicly available, as it is the case with RHEL?! Where is that?!
Ubuntu LTS sure seems like a good option (if you can get past this debian problem). Have you recently tried Ubuntu 6.06 LTS? Was it buggy?
PS: I've just checked their repositories, it seems even the backports only include firefox 1.5. So this may not be the best choice.
Whoa, whoa, dude, you're, like, totally awesome! All your frustrations have finally come to an end. You've discovered, like, what the rest of the world already knew since 4evar!1!!
I mean, you can't possibly tell us that having a base system on top of which to be allowed to play with various applications as if they were LEGO blocks is all right, right? Cause if you were telling us that, it would be like Windows, amirite? And we all know you're an open source fanatic who likes to torture himself by doing the distro hopping dance.
Welcome to the real world, where I install a copy of Windows and keep it for, like, three years. And all this time I get patches and security updates for it from Microsoft, and the applications I use have nothing the fuck to do with the base system, and I can update them the way I like.
Windows, the operating system for the power user who actually does stuff with the OS. Could it be that they got it right? Could it be that they were actually right ALL THIS FUCKING TIME? Could it be that Linux has a lot to learn from Windows instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every 6 months?
Just a word to say that I also share the point of view expressed in this article. I too would enjoy an entreprise-like distro, with options to update apps...
As of Dapper, I still use it on both my laptops (the old Toshiba and the Mac iBook G3), because it really runs well...
I make a living installing and maintaining network & PC's for end-users... 95% of my customers use Windows XP, the rest use Vista, Mac, and some use Linux... I must say that winxp is very flexible. Same base since 2001... We just change the apps, and update... It works so well, that Microsoft can't even get Vista to overtake it !
If there was a way to have a RHEL clone base, and to simply update FF, OOo, Pidgin, and Gimp... This would be great... But it doesn't look doable... So it's Fedora for me in the mean time...
Comments are closed, complaints to info@.
I think you're on the right track about what you need. Having a stable base system and just updating the few applications you care about is a good compromise between stability and features. You could run such system for 2-3 years without much problem (if it existed :-) )
I remember PCLinuxOS having a similar approach. They stayed for years with the same GCC, GlibC, and GTK versions (probably Xorg too, don't remember), but they did update the kernel, KDE, and other important parts.
Mandriva has the backports repo that is exactly for that, keep the same base system and update the apps you want/need. But Mandriva releases are not supported for 2-3 years...
Maybe an Ubuntu LTS? They have a backports (unofficial?) repository, if I'm not mistaken...
In the Enterprise ones I'm not sure, but doesn't SLED ship Service Packs that update such things as OpenOffice.org and Firefox? Yes, SLED is Mono dependent and probably lacks many packages...
Slackware has a stable base system supported for reasonably long. With a bit of work and Swaret or Slapt-get you can keep it up to date. Then you can update Firefox and OO.o from the official sites and build other small apps you might need.
Nothing perfect, but if you KNOW what you want, you can always find a reasonable solution.