Do we dislike Ubuntu
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
The way I've been using CentOS and Fedora. Is that I would use Fedora by default unless there some weird setup that can break easily because of upgrading to a new version of Fedora or requires more effort to get it working correctly.
Yeah, CentOS only as a "fallback".
Would you consider the same for Ubuntu? Latest Ubuntu release, LTS as a fallback?
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@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
The way I've been using CentOS and Fedora. Is that I would use Fedora by default unless there some weird setup that can break easily because of upgrading to a new version of Fedora or requires more effort to get it working correctly.
Yeah, CentOS only as a "fallback".
Would you consider the same for Ubuntu? Latest Ubuntu release, LTS as a fallback?
I only use Ubuntu in a must use case scenario, i.e. a vendor requires it. Then I always use the latest release. I always upgrade to the latest release.
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@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
The way I've been using CentOS and Fedora. Is that I would use Fedora by default unless there some weird setup that can break easily because of upgrading to a new version of Fedora or requires more effort to get it working correctly.
Yeah, CentOS only as a "fallback".
Would you consider the same for Ubuntu? Latest Ubuntu release, LTS as a fallback?
Absolutely. Ubuntu LTS is just for bad situations that you have to fix by not properly maintaining your OS.
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I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
Yes you have no support but I don't search for it. what you have to do is installing security fixes, and I trust both ubuntu e opensuse enough to set automatic updates for fixes only. On the other hand I got stable API and ABI to develop against.
Nice to me.
I would also like debian but they have a quite short release cycle. To me ubuntu is a sort of LTS over a debian base (ubuntu is something like 75% debian - and when I install ubuntu minimal I got something like 100% debian - on the source everything is recompiled).
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@matteo-nunziati said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
Yes you have no support but I don't search for it. what you have to do is installing security fixes, and I trust both ubuntu e opensuse enough to set automatic updates for fixes only. On the other hand I got stable API and ABI to develop against.
Nice to me.
I would also like debian but they have a quite short release cycle. To me ubuntu is a sort of LTS over a debian base (ubuntu is something like 75% debian - and when I install ubuntu minimal I got something like 100% debian - on the source everything is recompiled).
Debian LTS
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS -
@matteo-nunziati said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
I find it more work because the tools I want to use require newer versions of packages
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@matteo-nunziati said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
This I specifically want my developers to avoid - I don't want them depending on "old code" year after year so that we get into dangerous or expensive technical debt scenarios. I want them to find problems as soon as possible, as small as possible so that we are getting maintained code, instead of hitting risky forklifts after getting more and more entrenched by writing code that is no longer maintainable.
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
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@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
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@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
It's not about just breaking things, that shouldn't happen in either case. In both cases you deal with that through testing. What we are talking about between the two is whether your developers fix things "as they go" or if they save things up for years and then have to do major fixes to fix not only not keeping up as they went, but years of accumulated technical debt that could have been avoided.
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The problems that I see with LTS releases is that developers get to keep making "bad" code year after year, getting more and more invested into tech that is already dead. It's basically like zombie systems. If they weren't on an LTS, they would be forced to work with the newest techniques and libraries that will be needed within the next few years even with an LTS release. But this way they do it earlier so that the changes are minimal and as early as possible.
Using an LTS is only beneficial if those kinds of debt are being left in the system - the only advantage to an LTS release is the very thing I specifically want to avoid. And the more technical debt that is incurred, the more likely that the LTS has to be dropped in favour of "never updating again."
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
It's not about just breaking things, that shouldn't happen in either case. In both cases you deal with that through testing. What we are talking about between the two is whether your developers fix things "as they go" or if they save things up for years and then have to do major fixes to fix not only not keeping up as they went, but years of accumulated technical debt that could have been avoided.
I should say I haven't had any stability issues beyond some odd graphical program issues with Fedora, ever. So stability isn't really the right word for me to use there. I wish the major releases were a little longer. Certainly not as long as CentOS because those releases are far too long in my opinion, but around 1 year is just a little quick for some healthcare environments. 1 environment I managed had around 70 or so CentOS 6/7 VMs. I don't want to upgrade those every year. Every other year or every 3 years would be okay. At the same time, I'm not going to run a version or 2 behind.
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@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
It's not about just breaking things, that shouldn't happen in either case. In both cases you deal with that through testing. What we are talking about between the two is whether your developers fix things "as they go" or if they save things up for years and then have to do major fixes to fix not only not keeping up as they went, but years of accumulated technical debt that could have been avoided.
I should say I haven't had any stability issues beyond some odd graphical program issues with Fedora, ever. So stability isn't really the right word for me to use there. I wish the major releases were a little longer. Certainly not as long as CentOS because those releases are far too long in my opinion, but around 1 year is just a little quick for some healthcare environments. 1 environment I managed had around 70 or so CentOS 6/7 VMs. I don't want to upgrade those every year. Every other year or every 3 years would be okay. At the same time, I'm not going to run a version or 2 behind.
Why do you want any length over the "absolute minimum", though? What's the benefit to any length at all? There is a minimum time needed for testing and support, I'm not saying to shorted that. But even Fedora holds updates after that point for up to six months to hit their "cycle". I don't want even that, every day that those updates aren't released is a day that we might be making technical debt for no reason. I understand why they do it in six month releases, they want enough time to get the whole system into a state where people can target it for package announcements. And I'm okay with that. But why would you want it longer, rather than shorter?
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@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
Wouldn't it be easier, in the long run, to support the latest stable features and packages instead?
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@matteo-nunziati said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
This I specifically want my developers to avoid - I don't want them depending on "old code" year after year so that we get into dangerous or expensive technical debt scenarios. I want them to find problems as soon as possible, as small as possible so that we are getting maintained code, instead of hitting risky forklifts after getting more and more entrenched by writing code that is no longer maintainable.
well said
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@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
It's not about just breaking things, that shouldn't happen in either case. In both cases you deal with that through testing. What we are talking about between the two is whether your developers fix things "as they go" or if they save things up for years and then have to do major fixes to fix not only not keeping up as they went, but years of accumulated technical debt that could have been avoided.
I should say I haven't had any stability issues beyond some odd graphical program issues with Fedora, ever. So stability isn't really the right word for me to use there. I wish the major releases were a little longer. Certainly not as long as CentOS because those releases are far too long in my opinion, but around 1 year is just a little quick for some healthcare environments. 1 environment I managed had around 70 or so CentOS 6/7 VMs. I don't want to upgrade those every year. Every other year or every 3 years would be okay. At the same time, I'm not going to run a version or 2 behind.
Why do you want any length over the "absolute minimum", though? What's the benefit to any length at all? There is a minimum time needed for testing and support, I'm not saying to shorted that. But even Fedora holds updates after that point for up to six months to hit their "cycle". I don't want even that, every day that those updates aren't released is a day that we might be making technical debt for no reason. I understand why they do it in six month releases, they want enough time to get the whole system into a state where people can target it for package announcements. And I'm okay with that. But why would you want it longer, rather than shorter?
Shorter for major releases? More maintenence for major patching. Having a slightly longer time between major releases frees me up to focus on things other than testing/implementing upgrades.
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@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
I think that it makes "meaningful" breaks way more likely. CentOS does basically all the same changes as Fedora, just saves them up to make it far more painful when you have to deal with many at once. It's not like Fedora makes "more" changes, it just makes them in smaller amounts more often which protects you in many ways.
I can understand that. Having small things break, or rather maybe smaller things often rather than big breaks rarely, comes down to preference. Would I rather deal with small "noise" or a late night here and there with big stuff? If the small stuff does not effect end users to a point it is unnoticeable, but the big stuff takes down a service, those are big differences.
It's not about just breaking things, that shouldn't happen in either case. In both cases you deal with that through testing. What we are talking about between the two is whether your developers fix things "as they go" or if they save things up for years and then have to do major fixes to fix not only not keeping up as they went, but years of accumulated technical debt that could have been avoided.
I should say I haven't had any stability issues beyond some odd graphical program issues with Fedora, ever. So stability isn't really the right word for me to use there. I wish the major releases were a little longer. Certainly not as long as CentOS because those releases are far too long in my opinion, but around 1 year is just a little quick for some healthcare environments. 1 environment I managed had around 70 or so CentOS 6/7 VMs. I don't want to upgrade those every year. Every other year or every 3 years would be okay. At the same time, I'm not going to run a version or 2 behind.
Why do you want any length over the "absolute minimum", though? What's the benefit to any length at all? There is a minimum time needed for testing and support, I'm not saying to shorted that. But even Fedora holds updates after that point for up to six months to hit their "cycle". I don't want even that, every day that those updates aren't released is a day that we might be making technical debt for no reason. I understand why they do it in six month releases, they want enough time to get the whole system into a state where people can target it for package announcements. And I'm okay with that. But why would you want it longer, rather than shorter?
Shorter for major releases? More maintenence for major patching. Having a slightly longer time between major releases frees me up to focus on things other than testing/implementing upgrades.
Fedora reduces patching and major release overhead. Longer time takes more effort, not less. All of the reasons you list are reasons I'd want to avoid CentOS. Specifically because time is valuable and losing tons of time to major broken stuff is what I need to avoid.
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Using LTS releases....
@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@scottalanmiller said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@bbigford said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
No thanks on Ubuntu. I prefer Fedora for workstations and CentOS/RHEL for servers. I haven't tried Fedora on servers but have needed more stability and less bleeding edge features. Curious to start trying it out as a server instance in a lab though.
Fedora is not bleeding edge, that's not the right way to think of it. It's just current, if anything, I'd say that it is probably the more stable of the two. CentOS is "old", not "stable". The two are not the same thing. CentOS is for specific cases where you need to maintain unchanging libraries - not something you ideally want. We specifically want Fedora for better stability over CentOS.
I chose the wrong verbiage, having read back through what I wrote. I meant bleeding edge as in latest features and consistently up to date. Where things couldn't change due to requirements where things might break, I've used CentOS. Not necessarily that it is more stable, just that things wouldn't break as easily for that reason.
Wouldn't it be easier, in the long run, to support the latest stable features and packages instead?
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@black3dynamite said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
@matteo-nunziati said in Do we dislike Ubuntu:
I'm quite opposite: when developping stuff I really like to reduce the amount of maintanance of the OS. Of course too old is something I don't like, therefore I find a good balance by using ubuntu LTS and recently I've done a short test on opensuse leap too.
Yes you have no support but I don't search for it. what you have to do is installing security fixes, and I trust both ubuntu e opensuse enough to set automatic updates for fixes only. On the other hand I got stable API and ABI to develop against.
Nice to me.
I would also like debian but they have a quite short release cycle. To me ubuntu is a sort of LTS over a debian base (ubuntu is something like 75% debian - and when I install ubuntu minimal I got something like 100% debian - on the source everything is recompiled).
Debian LTS
https://wiki.debian.org/LTSI'm aware of it, but currently it is a best effort solution not a proper one.
