On February 9, 2001 05:37 pm, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
1. Newly supported hardware (don't kid yourself, new hardware comes out all the time)
Fair enough but if you have a stable system then your hardware is likely supported. Not to mention waiting for a new release means around three months or so. That assumes they actually include your hardware in the upgrade. It can be much faster to just grab what you need. 2. Ever tried to get something like GNUcash working on SusE? it's
more then a causal rpm -ihv. Somethings just don't work good. New SuSE means new packages that you didn't have before. Not everyone can fight through dependencies, and even fewer want to.
Not Gnucash but plenty of other things. Most tend to be ./configure make. Tarballs are often less hasle then the rpms. Too many RPMS are redhat centric with all the problems that brings.
4. Updates to XFree86 means more sported video cards, and new features, like, in 7.0's case, the first version of X 4.x with multiple monitor support, and in 7.1's case, many bugfixes to the "new" X version 4, plus new anti-aliasing fonts (er..right? I hope so)....yes, that matters to people like artists.
All things many of us already have. I've been running 4.0.2 since the week it was released. The tarball from xfree86 was a breeze to install. From what I hear the rpms weren't that easy to install.
6. New version == new version of most packages (how many times have we seen people scream for perl 5.6 on this list?). Yes, people want new versions of packages because they'll have bug fixes and usually new features
IMHO SuSE will always to be a little behind in most versions. They try and test things. Throw in the CDs need to get burned and the version SuSE releases can't be the latest and greatest. If you need the current version it is often best to just get it. You don't need to do that for everything but for the things that matter to you.
7.If you upgrade something as major as glibc you'll often have trouble with other packages. Same with, say, a new versino of gcc. it's best to upgrade everything at once.
Gcc isn't bad glibc can cause serious problems. Been there-)) I still say most people don't really need to upgrade. Every release people complain that there isn't anything new in the release. To me that means they've upgraded too soon. I'm not saying don't upgrade but I get the impression plenty of people feel they must upgrade and that often isn't the case. Nick