On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 10:36 +0100, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

> So I wouldn't expect any lower downtimes or costs when you'd use Gentoo.
> Sorry but I don't believe that Gentoo is doing a great job in keeping
> compatibility and stability (over for example 7 years) so that you would
> have to invest a lot of time to fix systems after "broken" updates.

My experience has been otherwise, everywhere I have deployed Gentoo it
required almost zero maintenance. However I must admit these were home
users only. However looking at the cases in which Gentoo is deployed on
a large scale (Medium to large clusters using Gentoo) I suspect it would
be also suitable for a corporate environment. 

> 
> BTW your numbers seem to be wrong. I get 279 EUR für 7 years of SLED.
My mistake, where did you get that figure?


> OK, in my opinion SLED is pretty interesting for companies because they
> don't have to care too much about the workstations themselves. Updates
> are available a long time and do work in most cases so it's not much
> maintenance needed (what would cause quite some costs for companies).
> For installations with Gentoo you'd need more manpower to maintain the
> systems I'd bet so it comes with a cost.

I think you are right about SLED being interesting for companies. maybe
Novell should make a interesting offering for home users looking for
something very stable?

Another problem is that SLED has security support for far fewer
packages. SLED only provides support for suse-oss and suse-no-oss which
isn't a whole lot (I guess around 3000 packages) in comparison to
Gentoo/Debian/FreeBSD which have security support for respectively:
12.000/22.000/16.000 packages.

> Compared with Windows I think it's in most cases no simple price
> comparison. We are talking about two completely different systems with
> advantages and disadvantages. In a corporate environment you also
> mustn't compare with XP Home. So the price difference is not high and it
> makes IMHO no sense to compare these prices. Compare everything else but
> not the license/maintenance costs here.

There you have a point, however it would be good for Novell to offer
something for the home user besides openSUSE.

> I don't have too many arguments in the home user space though. If people
> want a Linux system which is supported for a long time they have to
> invest money in some form.
> Gentoo is also no option here IMHO because those people don't want to
> "play" with the Linux system but work with it.
> 
> Wolfgang

I have deployed Gentoo many times to absolute Linux beginners without
problems. As long as you know how to click an icon on the desktop you're
fine. Any problems I encountered could be easily (within 10 minutes) be
solved through SSH.


-- 
Regards,

Aniruddha

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