On 02/26/2014 11:02 PM, Alexander Arlt wrote:
Forgive me but the life-span of RHEL or CentOS is not based on the lifetime of average PC hardware. I do have several machines and installations of RHEL 4 and we will have full support of hardware and software till Feb, 28th 2015. Probably longer. That's the E in RHEL and the ent in CentOS. Maybe I got that wrong and we now get back on the Entertainment the E and the ent was meant to mean from the beginning.
I have not said it is BASED ON, I said IT COVERS AVERAGE PC hardware, as in Personal Computer, not Server. Many in the "rest of the world", i.e. non-Western or non-Developed countries use older PC's. Even here at the doorstep of Europe I know people that upgraded their PIII/256MB to P4/2GHz/1GB only because of Youtube CPU requirements. And with WinXP gone soon, many will start thinking about Linux to replace them.
In last 45 days, official CentOS Facebook page had ~1,500 new members. Out of those I am guessing 85-95% were from Asia, and 99.9999% are newbies asking how to do simple things. From 7,500 members in the group, maybe 10 in total have any admin skills worth mentioning. Yeah, the rest should read the Docs, and yes, they are hardly ever going to read anything beside necessity. But if they perceive CentOS as not worth while, hard to start with, they will just leave to other distro's. and will drag dozen other potential users with them. I see that as an failure.