On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
If you don't follow the Fedora lists and get involved, well, you get what you pay for, I guess.
Following the list just makes it more painfully clear that they don't care about compatibility or breakage of previously working code/assumptions or other people's work. It's all about change. I tried to use/follow fedora for a while, but gave up when an update between releases pushed a kernel that wouldn't boot on the fairly mainstream IBM server I was using for testing.
We already had Upstart, and the move from Upstart to systemd is not that big (at least in my opinion), so it's not something that got me up in arms.
Backwards compatibility isn't a big/little thing, it is binary choice yes/no. If you copy stuff over and it doesn't work, that's a no, and it is going to cost something to make it work again.
Don't think people running a bunch of RH5 servers really cared about X or desktops at all...
You missed my Red Baron comment, didn't you? I ran Red Hat Linux 4.1 as a desktop, and once Mandrake 5.3 was out I went completely Linux as my primary work and personal desktop. I figured if I was going to run it as a server I needed to 'dogfood' things and really rely on it for daily work. And my employer agreed.
Did you keep track of the time you spent keeping that working?
Yes, but on the other hand, people still pay large sums of money for other operating systems. And there are some reasons for that.
Many of which are not technical.
Many aren't. And many are just a large base of stuff that works and will break if anything underneath changes.