On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 17:50 +0100, Johannes Nohl wrote:
Saying LTS I mean Long Term Support as ubuntu people do.
I know there's SEL but I'm asking for the open Suse.
extremely unlikely I say.. ;-)
So there's a conclusion.
On one hand there's "bleeding edge" software resulting on short support terms. That's what I use and love on my personal desktop. I have Suse on my radar since I ever heard of linux. All distributions are a little bit different and (open)Suse was always my first choice.
On the other hand little space in argumentation is left for non personal (really all except my desktop) use. So decision isn't made by license but made pragmatically. I'm not a professional admin but whenever I do something for somebody else I'm expected to give a foreseeing advice. If I'm setting up a web-server or mail-server for one of my projects there's no need for bleeding something. It is set up and expected to run longer that one and a half year. That's in fact the life cycle because you never meet the release date exactly. That applies even for desktop computers I set up for e.g. my parents.
Of course it costs a lot to maintain. But I really feel that I - as an opensuse user not a SLE costumer - am more than a development tester for novell's business products. My service in return is to recommend novell's business products if ever somebody would asks me. Although I only have experience to opensuse I would argue that a great product can't be bad if it's sold.
I did NOT understand ubuntu LTS as they would backport new software (except if security patches are only for the new versions) as mentioned. And they make difference between server and desktop. Really long is only the server supported. Server software isn't updated to often. When was the last bigger release from apache? From postfix?
From vsftp? From cyrus / courier / dovecot... Old samba still runs.
Ubuntu's first LTS release I took for marketing - they were pretty new then. But now they release a second.
Virtualisation is nice but it isn't all. If I buy SLES I feel paying 90% of the costs for the hype virtualisation.
Please *give it a try*. Declare core packages of 10.4 (or will it be 11?) as LTS. Not GUI packages but kernel, daemons and related. Give it it's own section on opensuse.org for community support. Provide a script which is telling me what will be lts'ed. The few remaining I can patch myself or maybe community does.
Finally I will have to unlaern another flavor of linux. Sad.
Johannes
Hi Johannes, Like i mentioned to jdd, there is nothing against using any version of sle/prof/open and keep on using it (one of my machines is still running RH-7.3), doing the bare maintenance upgrades yourself. Afterall, all the key-components are all "open". And all of it (and its updates) are to be found on the net. You call virtualisation "nice" and "a hype". well perhaps its nothing for you but for me, it decimated the number of servers i have to maintain. Slightly more difficult from a SW point of view, but a true heaven considering the hardware and all the troubles surrounding it. And then i don't even mention the possibilities of having several versions of SuSE, RH, and M$ concurrently and savely seperated. Only valid statement was that older version can be used on old machines with less cpu-power and/or mem. And even here the developpers are trying to put newer versions to a stricter diet (at least for the text-based installations) So even here there is hope on the horizon... Main reason imho for suse to limit the support is not to spread out the number of people over the number supported versions. (In contrast to other distro's, they DO test, you know) Nice to suggest that it might be taken-over by the community, but i am afraid that that doesn't work. If not convinced, have a look at the buildservice: many addon repo's are only build for the latest versions. And even if the were build for an much older release, how could they test it? Or do you suggest that for your good old SuSE-x.y, all the community-delevoppers must have all the different versions up and running to be able to test? Did not think so... So either you're willing to follow the latest versions of postfix/sendmail/apache/iptables/openssh/what ever or.. just use OpenSuSE, enjoy the updates and do a reinstall every 3 years Actually, come to think about it, most COTS-hardware has a everage life-cycle of three years, so after such period you should have plans to move anyway. hw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org