RE: Curious question

Tony wrote:
> Hi James,
>=20
> Thanks for the codes, I will try them out.
>=20
> Well, you ended saying that there is no need to
> upgrade. But then I have to ask why do people upgrade all the time?
>=20

There is a difference between upgrading and changing your distribution.

Moving from Fedora Core to Debian is not necessarily an upgrade.

Moving from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 is an upgrade.

In *most* cases, a version upgrade doesn't change things like the
directory layout between versions, so your scripts would not need to
change. =20

And you do not necessarily need a version upgrade at all unless your
distribution is terminating security support for the old one.

> Right now, Ubuntu seems to be taking off. But what
> does Ubuntu offer me or anyone that another Distro
> like SuSE or CentOS does not offer?
>=20

Umm, Ubuntu is the only distribution I know of where you can get a
bundle of 50 free CDs or DVDs mailed from France. They even pay
postage. =20

Everything else is available elsewhere. Ubuntu has spent quite a bit of
time and effort on its installer, targeted at the home desktop market.
But there has been a lot of work on installers lately, and I couldn't
tell you that it is easier to install Ubuntu than it would be to install
a recent version of SuSE or Fedora. Ubuntu has a server variant now,
but that market is pretty full so I couldn't tell you why to use Ubuntu
over anything else.

Different distributions might offer different management interface (SuSE
has YaST for example), perhaps additional software being available for
commercial versions, one might have ultra-fast security patches while
another offers ultra-stable (but a bit slower) security patches.
Perhaps you need a good enterprise support package (RHEL, SLED), or just
a different take on the world (DFSG, LFS).

One of these small things will make or break a distribution for you.
Once you find a distribution you like, feel free to stick to it. Do
upgrade regularly though, lest your production servers fall victim to a
l337 h4x0r.

And you can always try BSD. :)

James Zuelow....................CBJ MIS (907)586-0236
Network Specialist...Registered Linux User No. 186591
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Received on Wed Sep 6 10:29:03 2006