Where are we going? (Not a rant)

[Przemek Klosowski]

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.