Quoting Daniel Freedman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > C'mon, the last part of this statement is FUD. Hobbyists will still > probably happily continue to do installs of RH, just now net installs > through their Fedora project (or local mirrors), or will change to one > of many other distributions (Debian and Gentoo most notably, IMHO). RH > is smart enough to very much want hobbyists to continue to use their > distro (and Linux in general) since it seeds the pool of qualified > hackers/admins/etc. which is one of the hallmarks of the Free Software > / OSS movement. For example, I built our Beowulf cluster (100 Athlons > + 100Gb RAM) around Debian...
When I talk about hobbyists, I don't mean sysadmins and hackers. These can do wonders with very little resources. I mean people who want to get familiar with Linux, but don't want to compile stuff. Or install things from the command line and figure out how to net-install things. Those are people who may become hackers in the future, or may not. They may contribute to the community in other ways (help others, write manuals), or they may not. Bottom line is that they need an ISO, and a self-explanatory installation procedure. In the near future, that's no problem. There's Mandrake, which I use, and plenty of no-charge distros. But what if other companies decide that Red Hat's way is the right way, and pull their ISOs off the net? First there was SuSE, now it's Red Hat, Mandrake started to create delays between its paid customers and its hobbyist downloaders. This seems to be a trend that will end with no available ISOs. I don't trust the Fedora project. I don't know if there will be anybody there that will push a schedule for release. Yeah, the model works for OpenOffice and Mozilla. But the community model for a Linux community distro is Debian, and there you had two options: use the stable version, and stay way-way behind the times, or use the unstable version, have recent versions, but use a system which is basically beta. Never mind not having a common denominator with other users which helps them help you if you have any problems. Also, if I understand it right, installing Debian is not the greatest idea for a person who only ever used a graphical system in his life. I think that some of the success of the OpenOffice and Mozilla projects is the fact that they are pretty unique. A cross-platform office suit and cross-platform browser are something very much needed by the community, so the community contributes. Will this be true for a Linux distro, where some of the community is in Debian, some in Gentoo, and some in Fedora? Even while borrowing from each other, I think these will suffer for the split effort. I am waiting, though, to see what comes out of the Novell thing. Perhaps they will come up with an affordable desktop solution, which to me is just as good as a no-cost download. I always buy my persona-use distros. Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
