On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Aaron Toponce <aaron.topo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 09:29:51PM +0000, Lonnie Olson wrote: > > However, I disagree with your example of Ubuntu. It may be based on > Debian > > testing, but it gets as much focus as Debian stable. Has long term > service > > releases that are supported for 5 years. Can be supported professionally > > by Canonical (it's maker). Is fully supported as an OS for many > enterprise > > applications like VMware, even more than Debian itself. > > It gets a lot of attention and focus, but it doesn't have the QA process > that > Debian has when migrating their testing release to stable. The primary > focus is > to release LTS every two years in April. Only once was this held back, in > 2006. > At XMission, we run Ubuntu LTS servers, but we make it a point to wait for > a .1 > release before upgrading to the next LTS. More often than not, the initial > LTS > release is fairly buggy. > > I hear this point a lot, and I find it extremely lacking. "Stable" and "buggy" are ambiguous terms, and if we want "stability" of any extreme definition (like security or conservative in change), we should be talking about BSD or something. Waiting for a .1 release of Ubuntu has some prudence attached to it, but only if you have some very specific bugs to deal with (I've seen some, personally mostly on the desktop side than the server side), and you should know what those KINDS of bugs are. It's not typically kernel bugs, so maybe that's the only thing that matters to you? Maybe not. Dismissing anything as "unstable" or whatnot across the board is just being hand-wavy (and I'm not accusing Aaron of this, it's just an email chain, he's usually very reasoned in his approaches, this is just general audience stuff). The bigger complaint against Ubuntu should be its change in structure (like upstart) all the time. That doesn't mean "stability" whatever it's supposed to mean isn't important, but it should be a pragmatic and definitive requirement to our overall system goals, not some nebulous ideology. If "has lots of testing done by various users on lots of hardware in different environments" is important to us, Ubuntu wins here. If "has lots of performance testing done in the wild for security purposes by a few niche but very focused groups" is a better definition, than Debian does. If "has support for our enterprise" is our definition, RHEL is going to beat Canonical (I love Canonical, but their support is not comparable to RedHat's at that level in any review I've ever read, fan bias aside). That said, you don't typically write software for Ubuntu, you write it for some runtime or some server daemon of some kind, so it might not matter beyond sysadmin headaches, or it might very well matter because sysadmin headaches cost a lot (if you have thousands of servers, for instance). The point in all this is, choose the OS, like any other tool, that does the job you need it to, not the dogma you want or the system you know. If I'm an apt fan but have never use yum, well, learn yum and THEN do an analysis without my pride on the line. Whatever's popular is irrelevant unless you're doing this socially (and some of us are). Obligatory Arch mention! (Don't use Arch on your server, seriously. That was a joke.) -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
