On 12/08/2012 12:07 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Completely agree on this one. In my day job we started using
Fedora as one
> of our desktop os. Then support issues and upgrade cycle started giving
> nightmares to corp IT. They are looking at other avenues now. I really wish
> there is a LTS release for this awesome distro - Fedora.
Why does there need to be a long-term support for Fedora? Why not just
use Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Fedora is a good initial choice because it has the latest/greatest
software set. The problem appears later, because there is no graceful
way to switch installed Fedora systems into maintenance mode. This
discourages Fedora adoption because it implies a commitment to perpetual
upGRADES (as opposed to updates which almost everyone agrees are a
necessity in today's world).
By the way, as much as I like RHEL, it also has a difficulty with long
term support in a realistic environment where deployed systems age and
become less 'important' and actively maintained, until they are not
worth paying support for. I suggested to RedHat that they provide a
graceful switch-over to CENTOS in such case: it's possible manually
anyway, so it would be a nice gesture to do it automatically for
customers who let the support expire. As is in our case, this doesn't
even decrease the amount of support we purchase---it just gives us the
flexibility to deploy new systems all the time.