[CentOS] Re: Centos as a desktop, advisable?

[Feizhou]

beast wrote:
> On 25/07/07 10:38 -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
>>> They are kept functional and secure. I think that is enough in many 
>>> cases.
>>>
>>> If someone really needs a special app they can always compile it 
>>> and/or install it in their $HOME.
>>
>> Are you saying that you predict users will not need any new
>> compatibility or functionality in their primary desktop office suite
>> for the next 5 years?
>>
>> I don't think so...
>>
>> I think the previous poster has the ticket here.
>>
>> CentOS 5.0 as the base, but OpenOffice repo, Firefox repo and
>> possibly Gnome or KDE repo to keep primary office applications
>> current.
> 
> I'm confused here. Suppose in the next 3 year the latest OO version is 
> 3.1.1,
> today OO in Centos5 is 2.0.4, will it get updated to version 3.x or still
> using 2.x? or better just upgrade to Centos7 which has OOv3.1?

Really entirely up to you.

> 
> Learning from my mistake with RH9, its very dificult to get the latest
> software, even build from source since the dependencies is too much 
> (gcc/lib
> etc.) I have around 400 RH9 clients and its really a nightmare :(

The problem is that you cannot use third-party repos in Redhat 9 (IIRC) 
besides the problem of Redhat 9 being really old. With 
Centos/Ubuntu/Debian you get to have the base with certain packages 
overriden in your own repo which makes a bit more flexible than having 
to build and manually install tens or hundreds of your own packages. Of 
course, you might consider using images of the base OS for your 400 
workstations instead of relying on yum to manage those desktops.